Political Correctness Goes Galactic

Aeon magazine (an online "mainstream" magazine) sometimes publishes nonsensical articles, such as its current article claiming that the mind does not exist.  When currently popular academia ideas cause people to make such claims, it is the strongest possible signal that those who advance such ideas are people marching in the wrong direction.  A little less inane is a recent article in Aeon magazine entitled "Do we send the goo?" in which an assistant professor  ponders whether we should send "life-generating goo" to planets revolving around other stars. 

The author makes the doubly misleading statement below:

"Each planet or moon is its own world, with its own history and story to tell, and its own potential (however one might define this) for the future. Though mostly barren of life, they are far from empty; many are chock-full of the materials that would go into life-generating goo: sugars, amino acids, carboxylic acids and powerful molecules that drive reactions away from equilibrium."

The claim about many planets or moons being "chock-full" of amino acids and sugars like those used in life is extremely erroneous. There has never been any well-established replicated observations of amino acids or sugars existing on any other planets or moons. Not counting the very tiny traces of amino acids reported in lunar samples (believed to have come from earthly or astronaut contamination), the only claims of detecting an amino acid on another planet or moon is a dubious claim of detecting the simplest amino acid (glycine) in a very tiny trace amount (1 part in a billion) in the atmosphere of Venus.  Made by one paper, the claim has not been replicated by another paper. Since a claim last year of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus in the trace amount of 20 parts per billion was disputed by several other scientific papers (here, here and here), we can have little confidence in the claim of a much smaller 1 part per billion abundance of glycine in the atmosphere of Venus. 

No amino acids or sugars have been found on Mars or on Saturn's large moon Titan (where about 20 other chemicals have been detected) or an Enceladus (another large moon of Saturn where some chemicals have been detected, but not amino acids or sugars).  A claim has been made that some amino acids existed in a meteorite (Nakhla) reputed to have come from Mars, but the paper making that claim says, "The amino acids in Nakhla appear to be derived from terrestrial organic matter that infiltrated the meteorite soon after its fall to Earth." 

No one has claimed to have detected a ribose or deoxyribose sugar (the types of sugars used by life) on some other planet or moon. Some scientists claimed to have found a ribose sugar in a meteorite, but only in the trace amounts of a few parts per billion; and we can't be sure whether such an amount arose from earthly contamination. No one has generated a ribose or deoxyribose sugar (the types of sugars used by life) in any experiment realistically simulating conditions on the early Earth on some other planet.  

Claims such as the claim that "the stuff of life is all over the place in space" or that "the building blocks of life are common in our galaxy" have been commonly made ever since the often-misspeaking astronomer Carl Sagan started making them about 50 years ago. Such claims have no basis in fact.   

The building blocks of multicellular life are cells, which have never been detected in space outside of spaceships and space stations. The main building blocks of one-celled life are functional proteins, which have never been detected in space outside of spaceships and space stations. The building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life are the twenty amino acids used by living things, and nucleotides.  No nucleotides have been detected in space, and only two of the twenty amino acids used by living things have been found in space, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. 

No experiment done by scientists provides any warrant for any guess that amino acids or the type of sugars used by life are common on other planets or moons.  The famous Miller-Urey experiment produced some amino acids, but it was never a realistic simulation of conditions on Earth or any other planet.  The experiment consisted of a small closed glass apparatus only 5 liters in size that was subjected to weeks of semi-continuous electrical bombardment of 30,000 volts (with 12 hours a day of such electrical bombardment). There is no reason to believe that any similar-sized enclosed space on any other planet has ever been subjected to anywhere near as strong a daily electrical exposure.  So there is no observational or experimental warrant for the claim that any other planets are "chock-full" of amino acids or the type of sugars used by life.    Other experiments similar to the Miller-Urey experiment have had the same lack of realism because they used chambers subjected to near continuous bombardment of high energy, such as would not exist in nature. Any experiment realistically simulating planetary conditions will not produce amino acids or the type of sugars used by life. 

The second misleading part of the statement quoted above is its reference to "life-generating goo." Such a phantasmagorical concept has no basis in fact, and is like the idea of "car-generating tar." Even the simplest life is a state of extremely great organization and information. There is no reason to believe that any non-living information-free "goo" consisting of unorganized chemicals such as amino acids and sugars would ever give rise to life. No one has ever observed any type of life arise from any type of chemical "goo."  Moreover, no one has ever observed any of the real "building blocks" of one-celled life arise from some mere "goo" of chemicals such as amino acids and sugars. The main building blocks of one-celled life are functional protein molecules. No one has ever observed even a protein molecule appear from some mere "goo" of chemicals such as amino acids and sugars. 

By using the phrase "life-generating goo," the author has given us more "crumbs into castles" nonsense.  Such talk is fantasy, not science. The concept of abiogenesis (that life can naturally arise from non-life) has no basis in scientific observations or relevant scientific experiments. It would be much easier to build a castle than to build a one-celled living thing from low-level chemicals such as sugars and amino acids. 

The scientist author misspeaks when stating this: "Life is a molecular memory written in genes describing a basic chemical architecture." No, life is not genes, and is not a memory; instead DNA and its genes are one of many co-dependent complex components of living things. Multicellular life is something almost infinitely more complicated and organized than "a molecular memory written in genes describing a basic chemical architecture." Even the simplest known types of life (one-celled life) is a  state of organization so high that it is  misleading to describe such a thing as "a basic chemical architecture." There is nothing "basic" about the architecture needed for even a single self-reproducing cell. Such a thing would require more than 50 different types of protein molecules, each a very complex invention.  Most of these protein molecules would have hundreds of parts (amino acids) arranged in just the right way to achieve a particular functional end.  Neither a self-reproducing cell nor any of its a protein molecules has a "basic chemical architecture"; they have very complex and extremely organized architectures. Genes don't even specify the structure of cells. A much more accurate description of life would be this: "Biological life is when you have enormously organized and information-rich organisms that make copies of themselves." 

The author's shrink-speaking definition of life is just the latest example of the same error that many modern scientists very frequently commit: the sin of misrepresenting life, trying to make it look vastly simpler and less organized than it is.  Kind of the opposite type of error occurs when scientists attempt to describe DNA as if it were something much more than it is.   The author commits this error by stating, "DNA is at least a 4-billion-year-old encyclopaedia with information about the extant world, and the world that once was." No, the DNA in an organism is a repository of low-level chemical information, telling us which amino acids make up the proteins in that organism. An encyclopedia is a book or set of books containing alphabetically sorted essays about an extremely broad range of topics. DNA bears no resemblance to an encyclopedia, and does not have any description of the extant world or a previous world. 

Our scientist author then ponders a very strange proposal I have never heard anyone else propose:  that maybe we should create missions to send "life-generating goo" to other planets that do not have life.  The idea is not to plant actual living things on other planets, but some kind of chemical goo from which life might supposedly arise. The author seems to have interstellar ambitions for this very strange proposal, and rather seems to have got the idea that some very rapid progress is being made in interstellar rocketry (something humans have no actual competence in). We read the following:

"Destinations in our galaxy that once seemed ‘impossible to reach’ are now just ‘prohibitively expensive’. These destinations are, as I write, moving quickly into an even lesser category of ‘logistically difficult.’ "

But if you want to spread life around the galaxy, why not just directly plant life,  after some terraforming process that might make a planet habitable to life? Why plant chemical goo that would never actually give rise to life, and that even in the fondest dreams of materialists would only give rise to visible multicellular life maybe a billion years after the chemical goo was planted?  The author seems to be thinking that it would be more politically correct to just send lifeless chemical goo. We read this: "By sending a biogenic capacity and not a strictly predetermined molecular architecture, we would circumvent some of the uglier, more domineering aspects involved with pushing an alien (ie, Terran) physiology on other unsuspecting worlds through in situ missions or terraforming."

So the idea seems to be kind of: let's wait an extra billion years, because we don't want to be politically incorrect and domineering and colonialist when bringing life to other planets.  I don't know which is more ridiculous, this idea or the idea that incredibly organized information-rich self-reproducing cells can arise from lifeless disorganized goo containing no information.  

This "spread goo to the stars" proposal very much clashes with the writer's groundless previous claim that many planets and moons are "chock-full of the materials that would go into life-generating goo: sugars, amino acids, carboxylic acids and powerful molecules that drive reactions away from equilibrium."  If many planets and moons were "chock-full" of such materials, there would be no need for humans to go around planting chemical goo on other planets. 

There's another reason the "spread goo to the stars" idea is nonsensical: the fact that goo is biodegradable.  Some chemical goo planted on another planet would decay away fairly quickly, just as a spoon full of jelly won't last more than a year if you dump it on a rock in your back yard.  There would be essentially zero chance of anything living arising from some chemical goo before it dissolved. 

Postscript: On September 16 we had the latest example of a scientist trying to create unwarranted ideas about amino acids and sugars in outer space. We have a press release discussing some observations in space of three chemicals that are not any of the building blocks of life  and also not any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life. The paper presenting these observations does not refer to amino acids, sugars or nucleotides.  But one of the scientists misleadingly refers to "sugars, amino acids, and even the components of ribonucleic acid (RNA)" that he did not actually observe: "Laboratory and theoretical studies have suggested that these molecules are the ‘raw ingredients’ for building molecules that are essential components in biological chemistry on Earth, creating sugars, amino acids, and even the components of ribonucleic acid (RNA) under the right conditions."  This is rather like some boulder observer who did not observe interstellar spaceships trying to plant in your mind kind of the impression that he sort of observed interstellar spaceships, on the grounds that boulders have the kind of ingredients that would be used by interstellar spaceships.