Why We Should Be Skeptical If NASA Ever Announces ET Life Was Found

 Let us imagine a future event that would attract great worldwide attention. First, we can imagine that rumors start to spread around the Internet that NASA is about to anounce the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Then NASA announces a press conference in which it will release momentous news.  We might see newspaper headlines like the ones below:

We can imagine CNN and Fox News covering the press conference, in which some NASA officials or NASA scientists solemnly proclaim that life has been discovered somewhere in space.  If that happens, should we believe the announcement? 

We probably should not, because NASA has a bad record when speaking on the topic of extraterrestrial life and the origin of life. Let's look at some of its misstatements on such topics. 

On August 7, 1996 NASA released a press announcement with the headline "METEORITE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE ON EARLY MARS." The press release tried to convince us that some NASA scientists had found evidence of life on Mars by studying some meteorite. After a White House photo opportunity with President Bill Clinton, this story was carried all over the world. But now such evidence is not generally regarded as good evidence for life on Mars. It seems that NASA got overexcited about some marginal hard-to-interpret indications in a rock. 

There have been other similar cases in which NASA announcements on extraterrestrial life or the origin of life were not credible.  One such case was when NASA announced in 2019 "NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor."  The experimental study (discussed here) did no such thing.  The study merely produced alanine, one of the simplest amino acids. Claiming that you reproduced the origin of life when you merely produced alanine is as brazen a falsehood as claiming that you produced a novel when you merely produced some paper.  The study did not even discuss an experiment realistically simulating any early Earth conditions. The alanine was produced in closed glass vials. 

In 2018 the Daily Express had a headline, “NASA announcement shock: space agency closing in on finding alien life.” The paper quotes the agency as saying, “As we continue checking off items on the habitability list, we'll draw closer and closer to finding a world bearing recognizable signs of life.”  The headline and the statement were both false. NASA was not closing in on finding extraterrestrial life, and was not getting “closer and closer” to finding a world with extraterrestrial life.  An example of the reality is a recent paper reporting a search of 10 billion stars for evidence of radio signals, a search that found nothing. 

A recent NASA press announcement states, "Massive Stars Are Factories for Ingredients to Life."  The headline and story are misleading in two respects. The use of the term "factories" implies that something complex is being created.  That is not correct, because the report merely refers to very simple things: water (H₂0), ammonia (NH₃), methane (CH₄), and acetylene (C₂H₂).  All of these have chemical formulas much simpler than the amino acids that are the simplest things that could be called building blocks of life.  And neither ammonia nor methane nor acetylene is actually an ingredient of life, in the sense of being any kind of building block of life. 

It seems that NASA has a poor record of speaking accurately about matters relating to the origin of life or extraterrestrial life. So why should we have much confidence if it were to claim that extraterrestrial life had been found? 

In today's science news, there is a BBC article which wonders whether microbes could have traveled recently from Earth to Mars, riding on NASA spacecraft that may have been imperfectly sterilized. The article states the following: "Although Nasa and its engineers in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have precise and thorough protocols to ensure their spacecraft are free from any organisms that might inadvertently hitchhike on a space mission, two recent studies highlight how some organisms might have survived the cleaning process." So if NASA ever announces life was found on Mars, it could merely be an earthly microbe that was found.  Any such announcement would be an enormous boost to the prestige of NASA, possibly causing an increase in its funding. So we may wonder whether NASA has a motivation for sterilizing spacecraft to Mars in a somewhat less-than-foolproof manner. 

One type of announcement that could be made would be one claiming to have found radio signals from extraterrestrials. Any such announcement should be treated with skepticism. For one thing, there is a large possibility that some artificial radio transmission from Earth or from a satellite might be mistaken for a signal from extraterrestrials, a radio transmission that was never intended to be mistaken for a signal from extraterrestrials. 

For another thing, there is the fact that a radio signal resembling a signal from extraterrestrials can very easily be faked. One way to do that would be to have a satellite or space probe transmit a radio signal that was designed to look like an extraterrestrial radio signal. The possibility of such mischief by a foreign nation can hardly be dismissed in light of claims of foreign interference in the United States elections. 

Given such claims, there would always be the possibility that a radio signal that we thought was coming from another planet was actually coming from somewhere else in our solar system, perhaps from one of the satellites or probes of China or Russia or some other nation. There could be any number of reasons why a nation might resort to such a trick. One reason is that such a ruse might be used to create a distraction diverting public attention from some scandal or suspicions involving that nation, such as supicions of a pandemic arising from a lab leak coming from that nation. Or if a nation were planning on launching a surprise attack or doing a military buildup, it might create illusory “radio messages from extraterrestrials” to get the world's attention focused on such a matter, and away from threatening troop movements or weapons deployments the nation was starting to make.

Another reason for doubting the source of a message claimed as coming from extraterrestrials is that such a message might crop up as a result of computer hacking. The radio telescopes scanning for extraterrestrial signals are linked up to computers and software needed to analyze the signals. Such computers and software might be subject to computer hacking. Hackers might download a fake signal fooling astronomers into thinking they had received a message from the stars. If this sounds too far-fetched, consider all the high-profile large-scale hacks that have gone on in recent years, such as North Korea supposedly breaking into the computer systems of a major corporation, and the very recent major ransomware hack of Colonial Pipeline, a very large US energy distribution system.  Anyone reading the list of computer hacks given here (typically involving hundreds of millions of customers) should not doubt the possibility that hackers could hack into the computer networks of a small number of scientists searching for radio signals from space. 

A recent news headline

There are any number of reasons why hackers might want to create such a deception.  One would be the sheer fun of creating the ultimate prank.  There might also be more serious reasons. An announced discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might cause various movements in the prices of particular stocks. For example, a manufacturer of radio telescopes or a defense contractor might find their stock prices rising much higher after such an announcement.  So some hacking group might invest in futures or options on some corporation expected to have its stock price rise after an announcement claiming signals had been found from extraterrestrials.  Then such a group might cause some SETI systems hack creating fake data leading scientists to make such an announcement. The result might be a financial windfall for the hacking group, if it had invested in futures or options of the corporations with prices expected to rise after such an announcement.