Oops, That "Europa Water Plumes" Phantasm Sent NASA on a 5-Billion-Dollar "Wild Goose Chase"

 On October 15, 2024 I published a post entitled "NASA Just Launched a $5,000,000,000 'Snowball's Chance in Hell' Mission," which you can read here. I started out the post like this:

"Hurricane Milton delayed the launch of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which occurred  on Monday. It's too bad nature can't whip up some time warp that would allow going back in time to cancel the ill-conceived mission, which will almost certainly be a waste of 5 billion dollars that won't produce any very important scientific results."

The Europa Clipper mission is heading for Europa, a moon of Jupiter. In the post I explained why there is no need for a basic investigation of this moon. Europa has already been photographed by previous space missions, and we already know what it looks like. The surface of Europa has no very interesting features, because it is solid ice. Below is a photo of Europa. 

Europa (Credit: NASA)

The diagram below shows a cutaway view of Europa, which has a liquid salty ocean underneath a layer of solid ice that is at least 6 miles (10 kilometers) thick. The water plume on the top right is marked as a "hoped-for" feature.

In my post I described the wacky "throw ink at the wall and hope it spells correctly" gamble that is at the center of the Europa Clipper mission:

"But NASA scientists have a loony kind of 'bet all your retirement savings on a 9-digit lottery number' idea about how the Europa Clipper spacecraft might detect life. The scientists hope that it might be able to fly through a water geyser erupting on Europa, and sniff signs of life in water vapor. A NASA video told us that Europa 'might be erupting plumes of water,' and that 'if that's true, then we could fly through those plumes with the spacecraft.'  There are two reasons why there is virtually no hope that such a thing would ever succeed in detecting life."

I discussed the first reason, which is the gigantic improbability that life could accidentally arise from non-life. I then discussed the second reason, which is the gigantic improbability of Europa Clipper detecting life on Europa even if it exists in Europa's ocean under its ice. I wrote this:

"There is another reason the 'sniff life from a water geyser's vapor'  would have virtually no chance of succeeding. The evidence that water plumes even occur on Europa is only borderline, with some research casting doubt on the evidence. If water plumes occur on Europa, they seem to occur only very rarely and for a short time. The paper here suggests plume 'ballistic timescales of only 1000'  seconds, making the chance of a spacecraft flying through a plume incredibly unlikely (less than the chance of me dying from stray gunfire).  Europa's suspected ocean (the only place where life could exist) is 10 to 25 kilometers below a layer of ice, making it all but impossible that geysers could shoot out microbes through such an ice layer." 

Recently there was published a new paper suggesting I was right on the topic. It is a paper entitled "Europa’s Lyman-α emissions from HST/STIS observations." The HST referred to is the Hubble Space Telescope. The paper states, "We find evidence to support a persistent hydrogen exosphere at Europa, but no evidence of localized water vapor." A Universe Today article on the paper has the headline, "It Looks Like Europa Doesn't Have Plumes of Water Vapour After All." 

Oops, it seems like NASA has wasted 5 billion dollars on the silliest of wild goose chases, by sending a robotic spaceship to one of Jupiter's moons, to sniff water vapor plumes that don't exist. All that is likely to come from the Europa Clipper mission is some nice close-up photos of ice cracks.  It will be the kind of basically worthless result that would have occurred if some billionaire had launched drones to Antarctica, to get photos of barren ice cracks. You might compare the Europa Clipper mission to a project that puts super-expensive odor detection equipment in every reported haunted house, with the goal of sniffing ghost smells. 

It seems the Europa water-vapor plumes are one of the many chimeras conjured up by overeager scientists trying to create evidence of things they eagerly hope for. Scientists have endless ways to conjure up such illusory fancies, as I explain in my post "Scientists Have a Hundred Ways To Conjure Up Phantasms That Don't Exist." Such mirages tend to arise more often whenever there is something that scientists eagerly long for. In this case you had scientists eagerly hoping for a pathway that might allow for a detection of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. So they put their eager hopes in the driver's seat.  To read about some of the sociology at play when such goofs occur, read my post here entitled "The Social Construction of Eager Community Mirages."

Many Physicists Prefer Design Explanation of Cosmic Fine-Tuning

"The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 

 Prior to Darwin, William Paley made a famous analogy in his book Natural Theology, the analogy of a someone walking along a beach and finding a watch. Paley argued that it would be unreasonable for any such person to deny that such a thing (with so purposeful an arrangement of so many parts) was a product of design; and that it is just as unreasonable to deny that the purposeful arrangement of parts we see so abundantly in biological organisms is the product of design. The untrue legend arose that Darwin answered Paley's argument; but he did not. Darwin never mentioned Paley's famous analogy in any of his chief writings. Darwin never credibly explained how some fine-tuned arrangement of very many parts to meet a particular functional end could be naturally achieved. Darwin's paid almost no attention to the huge fine-tuned complexity and component interdependence in organisms. 

In the twentieth century, the evidence for what looks like purposeful design in organisms increased enormously, as scientists discovered the enormous organization and component interdependence of hundreds of types of human cells and thousands of types of protein molecules, very high levels of functional complexity Darwin knew nothing about. In the late twentieth century, it began to become clear that there was a second gigantic basis for believing in design in nature: the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and laws. It turns out that the universe must be very specially arranged for there to be any possibility of there being creatures such as human beings and civilizations such as our civilization. The table below helps to show some of the requirements. The color coding helps to show how the same things recur as requirements for multiple things. 

In 2024 a poll was taken at the Black Holes Inside and Out conference in Copenhagen. 85 physicist attendees filled out a survey, with the results described in the "Copenhagen Survey on Black Holes and Fundamental Physics" paper here. One of the questions was framed as follows: "In your opinion, what explains the values of physical constants of nature and the claimed anthropic coincidences?"  The wording of the questioning was biased, with the phrase "anthropic coincidences" tending to suggest a "just chance" explanation. Despite the wording, a small but significant fraction of the physicist respondents expressed support for an "intelligent designer" answer. 

The results were these:

About 3% of the physicist respondents preferred an explanation of "an intelligent designer." The most popular explanation was the non-explanation of "brute facts." Someone appealing to brute facts is someone basically saying, "There is no explanation."

The authors of this survey have since done a more recent survey, asking some of the same questions, but polling a much larger group of physicists. They give their results in the paper "Big Mysteries Survey: Physicists’ Views on Cosmology, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity," which you can read here. The authors of the paper start out by stating this:

"In the summer of 2024, a survey was conducted at the Black Hole Inside Out Conference in Copenhagen to assess physicists’ views on a range of ongoing controversies. Eighty-five scientists responded. One year later, the authors collaborated with the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine on a substantially larger follow-up survey, which polled 1,675 participants from the magazine’s readership and the members of the American Physical Society. The Physics Magazine survey therefore provides a broader view of attitudes within the physics community and allows comparisons with the more focused conference-based Copenhagen sample."

Figure 1 of the paper tells us that 70% of the respondents identified themselves as researchers, with only 21% identifying themselves as "a science enthusiast" or "other."

Question 6 of the survey was framed as below

Question 6: Anthropic Coincidences

Question. The values for nature’s physical constants—from the strength of nuclear forces to the mass of the electron—are not determined by current theories, It has been suggested that if these values had been slightly different, the universe would likely not have formed complex structures and—eventually—life. This idea has led some to call for other physical or even metaphysical hypotheses to explain the apparent 'coincidence' that these constants are tuned to life-permitting values. Others have however questioned if such arguments are on sound footing. In your opinion what explains the values of physical constants and these so-called anthropic coincidences?

Like the corresponding question in the previous survey, this question is biased. Its heading of "Anthropic Coincidences" rather seems designed to suggest in respondents the idea of mere chance or coincidence being involved. Nonetheless, a substantial fraction (9%) of the respondents selected "explained by an intelligent designer" as their answer to the question posed above. The responses are given below:

I may note that the paper documenting this poll makes no claim that it was a secret ballot poll, and makes no mention that the respondents were guaranteed that their responses would be kept confidential. In polls such as this, we can assume that any controversial answer would get a much higher response under circumstances in which the secrecy of a person's response would be guaranteed. 

None of the answers other than "explained by an intelligent designer" have high credibility. Specifically: 

• The first answer in the list above is the mangled claim that "the values of the constants are set by a principle (such as the 'naturalness' principle forbidding a theory to have independent, fine-tuned parameters)." The offered example makes no sense. The issue is why our universe has fine-tuned constants. You don't explain that by appealing to some principle involving theories. 
• The most popular answer ("they are brute facts that need no further explanation") is just an "I have no explanation" answer. 
• The "explained by anthropic selection in a multiverse" answer is witless. There is no evidence and can never be any evidence for any such thing as a "multiverse," some vast collection of other universes. The only universe we can ever observe is our own universe. There is no credibility in the idea of "anthropic selection." If a multiverse existed, it would not do any such thing as "anthropic selection" in the sense of selecting creatures like us, living in civilizations and enjoying long lives and having the ability to speak languages. It would be true that only observers could observe, but it would be almost infinitely more likely that chance would produce low-intelligence observers with very short lifespans not enjoying all of the conveniences we enjoy such as a pleasant planet, long lives, and metal abundances allowing long-lasting civilizations. And a multiverse would do nothing to explain why our universe was so lucky (as opposed to some universe). For a full discussion of the fallacies in trying to evoke a multiverse to explain our universe's fine-tuned features, see my posts here and here. 
• The "explained by a Darwinian process occurring in the cosmos (e.g. baby universes inside black holes)" answer is a reference to Lee Smolin's very silly, groundless and extremely speculative theory he called "cosmological natural selection." In a 2004 paper (page 38) Smolin said that the theory made a prediction, the prediction that "the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses." This prediction failed. The most massive known neutron star is PSR J0952-0607, which has a mass of approximately 2.35 times of the mass of the sun. 

The word "beachhead" is a military term referring to an initial position on an enemy-dominated territory, a position serving as a foothold for further expansion. We can describe the situation in regard to belief in intelligent design among physicists like this: the idea of an intelligent designer behind cosmic fine-tuning is an idea that now has a foothold or beachhead among physicists. We should not be surprised at all if this foothold is followed by a much greater expansion. The beachhead may turn into a breakout, maybe even something like the breakout of Patron's Third Army in August, 1940, arising from the beachhead at Normandy.  Today's 9% physicist belief in intelligent design could easily expand to be 20% or 30% within a few decades. 

A similar poll questions was answered by academic philosophers. As discussed in my post here, in that poll, more philosophers said they believed in a "design" explanation for "cosmological fine-tuning" than the percentage believing in "multiverse" as an explanation. This was despite the fact that academic departments of philosophy have long been environments in which atheistic thinking is predominant. 

The idea of pondering only the fine-tuned physics of our universe when considering the explanation for such fine-tuning is an approach that is defective. The more sensible approach is to consider the collective weight of all the cases of fine-tuning that we observe in nature, which include things that are tangible (such as human bodies) and things that are intangible (such as fundamental constants of physics). 

We now have more than 50 years of work in modern physics establishing how the habitability of our universe depends on just-right characteristics of numerous laws and fundamental constants of the universe. I document in my post here some of the physics papers that documented this reality in the 1970's. Work of this type continues. A 2023 paper by a physicist states the following:

"The values of some fundamental physical constants are considered to be finely tuned and balanced to give our observable world. Examples include finely tuned balance between quark masses needed to produce protons and neutrons ...and production of heavy nuclei in stars, which depends on the finely tuned balance between the fine structure constant ...and the ratio of the proton mass ..and electron mass...These and other examples suggest a narrow 'habitable zone' in parameter space...where essential biochemical elements can form... For this reason, fundamental constants are referred to as 'biofriendly' or 'biophilic' ....We need to tune the same fundamental constants setting α and β (ℏ, e, c, me, mp) that, importantly, involves tuning, which is additional and different to tuning involved in fixing α and β....We can conjecture that multiple independent tunings were involved. This includes tuning fundamental constants to produce heavy nuclei and additional tunings needed for other observed sustainable structures to emerge." -- Kostya Trachenko, "Constraints on fundamental physical constants from bio-friendly viscosity and diffusion" (link).

Scientist Flubs and Flops, #16

 

Tyson's False Claim That "'We're Made of the Most Common Ingredients in the Universe"

 The record of astronomers in estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations is a poor record. Moreover, in discussing some of the questions relevant to such an estimate, astronomers have long been guilty of misspeaking.

An example of such an astronomer who made great mistakes at such a task was Carl Sagan. Eager to promote the idea that extraterrestrial cultures were abundant  in our galaxy, Sagan again and again misled his readers and those who listened to him in interviews.  Making a grotesque misrepresentation of the complexity of the bodies of human beings, Sagan often repeated the slogan "we are all star stuff." Human bodies are enormously organized marvels of fine-tuned arrangement  that are the opposite of "stuff" (a word meaning something disorganized). The degree of organization in your body makes the degree of organization in the James Webb Space Telescope look trivial in comparison.

Sagan also repeatedly misled his readers and listeners by making the false claim that "the stuff of life" is scattered throughout the universe. The truth is that the lowest building components of living things are amino acids, which have been found in only the tiniest trace amounts in outer space, such as 1 part per billion on comets or interstellar molecular clouds. 

In his book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan dogmatically proclaimed on page 418 that "The number of extant civilizations substantially in advance of our own in the Galaxy today appears to be perhaps between 50 thousand and one million." The claim was as arbitrary and poorly established as Senator McCarthy's claims in the 1950's about there being 205 registered communists in the US State department. Just as McCarthy kept changing his estimate about the number of communists in the State Department, Sagan kept changing his estimates of the number of civilized planets in our galaxy. He would repeatedly claim that there were a million civilizations in our galaxy, and some of the times he made such estimates, he would try to suggest that whatever estimate he made was the estimate made by most astronomers, although he never gave any evidence to back up such a claim about a  majority of astronomers agreeing with him, and never even backed up any claim that a large fraction of astronomers agreed with him. The failure of 60+ years of efforts to detect radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations makes Sagan's estimates seem way off the mark. 

Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson "put on the mantle" of Carl Sagan when he hosted the retread of Sagan's TV series Cosmos. And Tyson has repeated some of Sagan's errors. In a recent interview with the Daily Mail, Tyson starts out by falsely claiming that everyone who has studied the question of extraterrestrial life believes in extraterrestrials. He states, "Anyone who's studied the problem would answer without hesitation that we are not alone." To the contrary, a large fraction of those who have studied the issue of extraterrestrial life are pessimistic about the chances of extraterrestrial life, because of the extremely high organization and functional complexity of even the simplest living cells, a state of organization we would never expect chance to produce from lifeless chemicals. 

Life originating from non-life has zero observational or experimental basis in physics, chemistry, biology or astronomy. No experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever even produced the amino acids that are the building components of protein molecules. The Miller-Urey was not such an experiment, for reasons discussed here. 

In the most recent poll asking astrobiologists about whether they believed in intelligent extraterrestrials, roughly 40% failed to answer that they agreed that intelligent extraterrestrials exist. There has always been widespread skepticism among many scientists that intelligent extraterrestrials exist, based on factors such as the very high organization of even the simplest self-reproducing cell. So Tyson misleads us when he says, "Anyone who's studied the problem would answer without hesitation that we are not alone." This is as false as claiming that anyone who has pondered whether God exists would agree without hesitation that God exists. Intelligent life may be very common in the universe, but its chances of arising elsewhere without the assistance of some purposeful agency seem slim.   

Tyson's very next statement in the interview is an equally false statement. He states, "'We're made of the most common ingredients in the universe." This is not at all true. None of the things depicted below are common in outer space. 

A Google Gemini infographic

There are two ways to look at whether that statement is true: to look at the question from the standpoint of elements, and to look at the question from the standpoint of molecules. The universe is 74% hydrogen and 24% helium. All other elements make up less than 2% of the universe's mass. Human bodies have no helium, and no free hydrogen. By weight the hydrogen in your body makes up only about 10% of your body. So from an element standpoint, it is not at all true that you are made of the most common ingredients in the universe. 

But what about from a molecular standpoint? The most common molecule in the universe by far is a molecule consisting of nothing but two hydrogen atoms. That molecule is not found in our bodies. The next most common molecule in the universe is carbon monoxide, which is not found in appreciable amounts in the human body. Water is believed to be the third most common molecule in the universe, and water is found abundantly in the human body. But water is 100 times less common in the universe than carbon monoxide. 

From a structural standpoint, the real "ingredients" of our body are protein molecules, things that are not found in any abundance outside of planet Earth. Each protein molecule is a very complex special arrangement of hundreds or thousands of amino acids. Amino acids are very rare outside of planet Earth. They are so rare they have never been discovered on Mars.

So Tyson misinforms us badly when he says, "We're made of the most common ingredients in the universe."  It is misleading to describe a human as "made of ingredients," a phrase that misleads us by suggesting that internally we are simple, like some soup of structural simplicity. Materialist astronomers want you to believe that physically you're nothing very special. The facts of science teach us the exact opposite: that a human body is a state of fine-tuned hierarchical organization 1,000,000,000,000,000 times more impressive than any state of organization yet discovered outside of planet Earth. 

Appendix:  The simplest amino acid is glycine. There is no robust evidence that glycine exists in any appreciable amounts 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." 

A few years ago we had a press release from EurekAlert!, a source that  often recycles misleading or dubious press releases from various institutions and universities. The press release was entitled "An amino acid essential for life is found in interstellar space." The press release refers to a paper "A search for tryptophan in the gas of the IC 348 star cluster of the Perseus molecular cloud." In the paper the lone author of the paper (Susana Iglesias-Groth) makes no confident claim to have found tryptophan in interstellar space; and the title refers to a search, not a finding. She merely claims to have got some spectrum readings that she claims are compatible with tryptophan. Spectrum readings from very distant space are very often subject to multiple different interpretations. The Perseus molecular cloud is 1000 light-years away, and trying to use spectrum readings to detect a molecule existing only in trace amounts is a dicey business with a large chance of error. 

All reports of detecting amino acids in asteroids, comets or interstellar space are reports claiming detection at the tiniest trace amounts levels such as 1 part per billion. Amino acids are emphatically not some "of the most common ingredients in the universe."