The Faulty Figures in an Astrobiology Paper

 The 2022 science paper "Life beyond Earth: How will it first be detected?" by Chris Impey has some figures designed to cause us to be hopeful about the chances of detecting extraterrestrial life before the year 2035. But the figures are misleading, and the prospects of detecting such life before the year 2035 are dim. 

Let us look at some of these figures, and why they mislead us. Figure 1 in this paper is this cheerful visual:

Below are comments on some of the circles in the diagram.

• "Evidence that organic molecules form easily and readily." The trick of appealing to a supposed widespread existence of "organic molecules" is the oldest trick of astrobiologists. Saying there are  lots of "organic molecules" in outer space makes people think that outer space is life-friendly. But when scientists use the term "organic molecules" they merely mean molecules containing carbon. Most of these "organic molecules" are not components of life or any indicators of life. 
• "Evidence that planet and moon habitable locations are abundant." Before there was launched telescopes such as the Kepler telescope and the James Webb telescope, the hope was that many earth-sized planets would be found in the habitable zones around other stars. By now more than 5000 extrasolar planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. Only very few Earth-sized planets have been detected revolving around sun-like stars in habitable zones. When I ask Google how many, an AI overview lists only three (Kepler-452b, Kepler-1606b, and Kepler-1649b). So rather than using the phrase "abundant" here it might be better to use the term "rare." 
• "Evidence that Earth life can survive under a wide range of conditions." Such evidence does not tell us anything very important about the likelihood of an accidental appearance of life on another planet. 
• "Evidence that ingredients for life are widely available in time and space." It would be fallacious to argue that books can accidentally be printed in a book manufacturing plant,  on the grounds that "ingredients" for books (such as paper and ink) are widely available at such a spot. Similarly, even the simplest one-celled life is a state of very high organization, something requiring a very special engineering, not merely "ingredients." The amount of information and organization needed for even the simplest life is comparable to the amount of information and organization needed to produce a 100-page technical manual. 
• "Evidence that life appeared early in the history of the earth."  We do not know that life appeared very early in the history of the earth. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, and claims are made that there are geological signs of life dating back to 3.5 billion years. But such claims are doubtful, as they rely on what are called stromatolites, unusual-looking geological features which some claim were formed by bacteria. We see no cells or biological structures in the oldest stromatolites. The claim that very old stromatolites (older than 3 billions years) are signs of ancient life relies on a rather complicated and debatable line of reasoning. It's quite possible that they are not signs of early life, and that there are alternate geological explanations. This scientific paper says the evidence for life older than 2.5 billion years is “meager and difficult to read.” If you were to prove that life arose on Earth in the first billion years that it could have arisen, that would not tell us anything about the unlikelihood of life accidentally arising. Extremely unlikely things that might happen in any of ten time periods often occur in the first of those time periods. For example, someone may be killed by lightning during the first of ten decades that he might have been killed by lightning. But that does not tell us anything about the likelihood of being killed by lightning. 

Later we have a Figure 5 which attempts to persuade us that there is a "basic foundation" for "biomarkers" on Enceladus and Titan, two moons of Saturn.  Biomarkers have not been detected on either of these moons. Later there is a Figure 9 which has a large title of "SETI Success." So far SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been a dismal failure. 

Later we have this as Figure 10:

The figure predicts that life would be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) using "IR Spectroscopy" (infrared spectroscopy) by the year 2024. This discovery is judged to be something that would occur with "high" probability. It is now the year 2026 and no such detection has occurred. There was a false alarm announcement by a glory-seeking astrobiologist in the year 2025, but other scientists said the announcement was groundless. 

There is also no reason to think that the GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope) or that the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) will have a "high" chance of detecting extraterrestrial life, as Impey assumes in the figure above. These GMT and ELT telescopes will be observatories in Chile that will be subject to distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere, something that the James Webb Space Telescope avoids. 

It seems the underlying  assumptions of astrobiologist author Chris Impey are very wrong. Making an equally bad blunder, Impey predicted that a Mars sample return would have "high" odds of life detection. There is no basis for such optimism. Life requires many types of protein molecules, and most types of protein molecule require a very special special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. Amino acids have never been detected on Mars, and the surface of Mars is extremely inhospitable to life. Given such facts, there is no basis for thinking that a Mars sample return mission would be likely to detect life. 

It seems that astrobiologists such as Impey are people who are very  overoptimistic. A central tendency of materialists has been a tendency to vastly underestimate the complexity of living things and the complexity of minds. This tendency has led materialists to make bad predictions about when the origin of life would be understood and when extraterrestrial life would be discovered. 

So in the year 2006 on the page here chemist Robert Shapiro predicted that the origin of life would be understood within five years, this being a prediction that the origin of life would be understood by the year 2011.  Twenty years later the problem of explaining the origin of life is still a problem 100 miles over the heads of scientists. Even the simplest self-reproducing one-celled organism is a state of organization so high that we should never expect it to arise by chance anywhere in the universe. 

In the year 2015 Ellen Stofan (a chief scientist at NASA) predicted, “I think we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” It's now the year 2026, and the prediction of finding "strong indications" of extraterrestrial life by the year 2025 failed. In 2025 NASA tried to get people excited about some rocks found on Mars, using the term "potential biosignatures"; but it was purely verbal trickery and groundless hype. Nothing like any decent evidence for life had been discovered. 

In a 1964 report of the Rand Corporation a large group of  experts (largely Darwinist materialists) were asked when there would occur "creation of a primitive form of artificial life (at least in the form of self-replicating molecules)." Many of these experts gave estimates between 1980 and the year 2000. It is now the year 2026, and no such thing has happened. 

The experts were blinded by their allegiance to materialism. A proper study of the mountainous degree of organization and fine-tuned complexity in even the simplest thing would have led you to estimate that scientists would never be able to create artificial life from chemicals. But the experts did not make such a study, because they wanted to believe that self-reproduction is relatively easy to achieve. 

A Table Comparing 5 Studies of Near-Death Experiences

Sudden cardiac arrest is a major cause of death, suddenly killing about 350,000 each year in the United States alone. Of those who experience sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital, few survive. 

A big recent study on what goes on in near-death experiences is now available in preprint form. It is the study "Psychometric evaluation of the Danish Near-Death Experience Content scale in a sample of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors," which you can read here. 

The study by Tobias Anker Stripp MD and someone else used as its starting point 2,785 people who survived out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. They were asked, "A life-threatening situation or illness (such as an accident, cardiac arrest, or cancer) can cause some people to lose or experience an altered sense of consciousness. Some may subsequently recount memories from the time when they had lost, or experienced an altered state of consciousness, whereas others cannot remember anything. Do you have any memories from such an experience?” Those responding "yes" or "don't know" were sent out a survey about near-death experiences, and according to page 10 of the preprint, 738 answered this survey. This gives a response pool much larger than the other surveys summarized in the table below, as those other surveys all involve fewer than 100 respondents. 

Let's compare the results of this study with the results of similar studies. The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

Study 5: "Psychometric evaluation of the Danish Near-Death Experience Content scale in a sample of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors," 738 subjects (link).  This involved a scale in which you could answer between 1 and 5, with "0 – not at all; none”, “1 – slightly”, “2 – moderately”, “3 – strongly; equivalent in degree to any other strong experience”, and “4 – extremely; more than any other time in my life."  Only responses of 2 or greater are included in the percentages listed in the "Study 5" column below. So in the "Study 5" column below I give the mathematical sum of the right-most 3 columns of particular rows in Table 1 of this study, which appears after the main text of the paper. 

In the table below, blank squares occur whenever the survey had no question corresponding to the question on the left side of the row. Blank squares do not mean that 0% answered "yes" to a question.  

The recent study described in the Study 5 column gives results similar to those of previous studies on near-death experiences. (Those reading this page on a smartphone will need to finger swipe to the right to see the columns for Study 4 and Study 5.)

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4	Study 5
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%	17%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	48%	14%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%	40%
“Hyper-lucidity” or thoughts speeded up		41%			36%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%			23%
"Awareness of being dead" or awareness of dying		26%	50%		23%
Distortion of time	79%	47%			38%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	51%	19%
Contact or communi-cation with the dead	30%	23%	19%	16%	14%**
Out-of-body experience	75% (27%?)*	35%	24%	31%	20%
Having some sort of non- physical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%	13%***
Reaching a border or point of no return	57%		8%		12%
Life reviewed or relived	27%	15%	13%	44%	13%

*Study 1 says, "The impression or feeling of seeing oneself to be out-side the physical body, an 'out-of-the-body experience,’ was reported by 75% of our respondents." But the study's Table 1 gives a different figure of only 27%. 

** In Survey 5 the question was, "You encountered a presence and/or an entity (who might be deceased)."

*** In Survey 5 the question was, "You saw or entered a gateway (for instance a tunnel or a door)."

The recent study (Study 5) getting results for so many survivors of sudden cardiac arrest provides powerful new evidence against all attempts to naturally near-death experiences. During sudden cardiac arrest, the electrical system of the heart malfunctions, and the result is a stopping of the heart that produces a flatlining of brain signals (called asystole) within 15 or 20 seconds after the heart stops. We cannot explain near-death experiences in such people by imagining that they were hallucinating. A flatlining brain that has electrically shut down cannot hallucinate. 

Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of a 2023 paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  The brain waves flatline very quickly after the heart stops beating. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, and using the term "ischemia" meaning a lack of blood to the heart, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric," meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this, using the term "isoelectric" which means flatlining. 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

Attempts to naturally explain near-death experiences tend to ignore this reality that such experiences typically occur during cardiac arrest when the brain has flatlined, a reality excluding a hallucination explanation. 

I normally think of The Conversation as being a materialist web site, given the type of articles it so typically publishes. So I was surprised to recently read an article at that site favorably covering near-death experiences and candidly discussing some of their currently inexplicable features. In the article we read this:

"A subset of out-of-body experiences involve verifiable perceptions. In other words, the patient recalls perceiving something they should not have while unconscious (beyond simple memory reconstruction). The International Association of Near Death Studies published a compilation of more than 100 cases in the second edition of The Self Does Not Die in 2023. These include descriptions of objects in places that were out of reach to those in the room, even if they were trying to look. For example, 'a 1985 quarter lying on the right-hand corner of the eight-foot-high cardiac monitor,' which a physician found upon climbing a ladder. Another example is a 12-digit serial number on top of a seven-foot respirator, referred to by a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this case, the serial number was confirmed by a technician."

My post here summarizes many of the best cases of this type published in that book. 

Science News BS Heat Map, June 12, 2026

         

Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex		---
"Dark triad personality traits carry distinct physical signatures in the brain"		This low-quality study follows a defective plan followed by many brain scan studies: (1) you identify about 24 people with some particular mental characteristics; (2) you then brain scan them and brain scan about 24 control subjects; (3) you then look for brain differences (being free to look anywhere in the brain), and claim these differences as "brain signatures" of the mental characteristic.  The fallacy is that any two randomly selected groups of people will always have some differences in their brains, no matter how identically they think and behave. A convincing study of this type would require a pre-registered hypothesis, with a comparison made of only some specific area or type of brain difference that previous research had suggested, along with a much larger study group size; and no claim of discovering anything would be justified until there were repeated replications of the reported brain differences, replications in pre-registered studies.**
"The first complex cells had genes from a complex mix of species"		The article refers to eukaryotic cells far more complex than much simpler prokaryotic cells, believed to have existed first. But even the simplest self-reproducing prokaryotic cells are enormously complex units, requiring hundreds of specialized proteins. Article titles like this mislead us by describing eukaryotic cells as "the first complex cells." All cells are enormously complex.
"An Early Step on the Long Strange Road to Photosynthesis"		Quote: "However, the set of chemical reactions we call photosynthesis has bewitched and befuddled scientists for generations. It requires the coordination of dozens of proteins and hundreds of pigments that harvest photons, all embedded in a cellular structure less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Electrons pinball across membranes and between compounds to drive molecular turbines that rebuild air and water into sugars to provide the energy and raw materials that cells need to grow." The article  tries to suggest the beginnings of an evolutionary account for this mechanism with a very high functional threshold, but fails to tell any credible tale of how it could have arisen through any gradual process. But at least there's a good explanation of the vast complexity of photosynthesis.
Bumblebees can solve complex puzzles like chimpanzees and elephants, study finds		When wonders of cognition like this occur in insects with almost no brain cells, it is more evidence against the "brains make minds" dogma that neuroscientists keep senselessly parroting.
"A study by IRB Barcelona and the BSC rethinks the origin of our cells as a story of microbial alliances"		"The study challenges the idea that cellular complexity emerged from a single evolutionary encounter, pointing instead to a gradual process of interactions among different microorganisms that lasted for millions of years." The ridiculous "standard story" tall tale of eukaryogenesis is rightly challenged, but the suggested replacement is equally unbelievable.
"How the brain regulates learning on a cellular level: 3D maps reveal synapses reorganizing in real time "		The press release is promoting a study that  electrically zapped dead brain tissue from rats, something that does nothing to explain how learning occurs in living humans who are not electrically zapped. For more on the press release and its study, read here.
"Ancient genome duplications laid the foundations of complex brains"		We have an attempt to explain a huge number of new genes required for the appearance of the first brains, an attempt that very implausibly appeals to "genome duplications." Innovative new types of genes cannot credibly be explained by appealing to duplications. We read, "The data analyses were mind-bogglingly complicated." That should cause us to suspect shaky, dubious analysis.
A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins		We have the confession, "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered." But if you don't understand that, what confidence can you have that any descent or ancestry from unicellular life ever occurred? The suggested solution is the same old "clumping" aggregation explanation that utterly fails to explain how we got the very complex anatomical innovations used by visible life forms. *

*"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 

** The paper authors basically confess the low value of what they have produced, by saying, "Our exploratory whole brain analysis revealed significant results in hypothesized regions, that did not survive correction for multiple comparison and therefore did not reach significance in the regions-of-interest analysis." Those very familiar with neuroscience and statistics will recognize this as basically a confession of having produced nothing convincing.

The Troubling Findings of a Survey of Science Journalists

The Kavli Foundation awards million dollar prizes for science research.  The foundation has done a survey of science journalists. One of the questions asked was "In your opinion, can science journalists be neutral about the subjects they cover?" We will never know what the response was, because the slick document presenting the research results gives us two conflicting answers. 

On page 23 the report says, "Asked whether science journalists can be neutral about the subjects they cover, 57% of survey participants answered no, and 35% answered yes (Figure 19). Nine percent said they don’t know." But the bar graph presenting the response (which is actually Figure 11 on page 24, not Figure 19) says that 57% answered "yes," and 35% answered "no." 

Regardless of which answer is correct, the result is a troubling one. Apparently at least one third of science journalists do not believe in the principle of journalistic neutrality. The result is very unsurprising. It has been all too apparent that very many science journalists act as uncritical cheerleaders for the researchers they are covering. 

A bit later in the report we have this example of stupidity and carelessness:

The carelessness comes in the misspelling of "certainties," similar to the misspelling of "publication" that occurs in the caption of Figure 13, and the misspelling of "sources" that occurs in the caption of Figure 18.  The stupidity comes from the 16% of the science journalists who answered that scientific findings should be reported as certainties. In today's world of science research, very many or most of the reported research findings will fail to be replicated or fail to stand up to further scrutiny. So it is inane to have a policy of "reporting scientific findings as certainties." 

Another rather troubling result comes when we see Figure 15 on page 27. Asked about coverage of retracted papers, only 65% of the science journalists said that you should mention that the paper was retracted. 21% thought that you only need to mention that the paper was retracted if there was some "major reason" such as fraud. 

Another rather troubling result comes when we see Figure 16 on page 29. Asked about correction of errors in coverage, 17% of the science journalists said that "you only correct the errors if you consider them major errors." So apparently a large number of science journalists are failing to correct errors they have heard about in science stories they have written, while using the excuse that they were not "major errors."

Another troubling result comes when we see Figure 18 on page 31. Asked about "selection of sources," 73% of the science journalists agreed that "you look for the most important scientists in the field." This is an indication of some kind of authority-kneeling that is contrary to the true spirit of science. A good answer to the question might be something like "you look for the scientific paper with the largest study group size" or "you look for the claims that are best supported by many strong observations." Who is or is not one of "the most important scientists in a field" is a subjective opinion subject to the whims of popularity trends. 

Another troubling result comes when we see Figure 23 on page 36. Asked about whether it is acceptable for science journalists and their scientist sources to become friends,  66% of the science journalists said that is okay. But why should we expect that a science journalist will report objectively when reporting on work done by one of his friends?

It helps if the science journalist is a scientist's pal

Another troubling result comes when we see Figure 24 on page 37. Asked about whether it is acceptable for science journalists to receive gifts and paid trips to cover conferences, 36% said that it was acceptable "if they can maintain independence in their coverage," with only 27% saying it is not acceptable for a science journalist to receive such gifts or paid trips.  We get here a clue as to the kind of backdoor bribery that must be frequently occurring. Science journalists are getting freebies to cover science conferences, things such as paid trips to exciting locations (with also possibly free meals and free lodging).  Such benefits make it more likely that the science journalists will report favorably on the research results reported at such conferences. 

We get a similar dismaying result when examining Figure 25, which reveals that a large fraction of science journalist think it is okay to cover institutions that have paid the science journalist. 

We get a troubling result displayed in Figure 28 on page 40. The science journalists are asked about ethical problems in their field. 52% of science journalists list political or corporate spin as a problem. It is an enormous problem. For example, corporations often fund scientific studies designed to promote pills or medical devices they manufacture, with such corporations pressuring science journalists to provide favorable press coverage of the resulting study (often a low-quality affair providing no robust evidence).  56% of science journalists list "Fake News" as an ethical problem. They are referring to fake news produced in articles and press releases written by science journalists themselves (or the PR departments of corporations or universities writing research-related press releases). 58% of science journalists list "pressure to provide news that attracts audience" as a problem. This is the problem of clickbait that I have discussed many times. Nowadays science news is all entangled with economically motivated clickbait which leads internet users to click on enticing but misleading headlines leading to news articles filled with ads that make money for the party running the website. 

Also troubling is this quotation from the report

"To those who answered yes to this question, we asked if their country’s journalism association has a code of ethics for science journalism (Figure 31). In this case, 45% of journalists said they did not know. Another 33% answered yes, and 23% said no."

This gives us the impression that a large fraction of science journalists have no great interest in ethics, and were too uninterested to check whether their country has a code of science journalism ethics they should be following. 

All in all, this survey provides us many reasons for distrusting the stories appearing on sites that are supposedly science news sites. Science journalists are part of the profit complex described below, where many may act wrongly for personal profit or personal benefit. 

There is actually a Society of Professional Journalists in the United States. It has a code of ethics you can read on the page here. One of its stated principles is "Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility." But in the result quoted above, a large fraction of science journalists seemed to be oblivious to this principle. The same code of ethics states, "Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear." This principle is not well-followed by science journalists, who are always parroting  dubious boasts from the same old overconfident academia authorities, while rarely asking for quotes from reasonable and highly studious critics of such boasts. A large fraction of all science journalists write only the most one-sided articles telling us only the materialist account, while parroting old dubious speech customs, giving us coverage of science research and science issues about as "fair and balanced" as the press coverage of North Korean journalists. 

The same code of ethics states, "Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story." Very many science journalists these days flagrantly violate this principle, by producing sensational-sounding articles that misrepresent low-quality scientific studies, making them sound like breakthroughs or important insights that they are not. 

The production of misleading "science news" stories has a very strong economic incentive. Web sites are regularly publishing misleading science-mentioning headlines. When people click on such headlines, they go to pages filled with ads, and such pages make money for whoever publishes the web site. This is the problem of clickbait, which these days is the gravest problem for the integrity of science articles. Nowadays clickbait is an out-of-control epidemic on the Internet. A recent example of misleading clickbait is discussed here, a case in which a study electrically zapping dead tissue extracted from rats was misleadingly described to create the impression it had provided insights into how memory works in living humans who do not get such electrical zaps. 

A Google Gemini infographic