NASA Replaces the Old Origin-of-Life Bunk With Some New Origin-of-Life Bunk

One of my favorite jokes about computer programming is one in which one programmer asks another programmer what he is doing, and the programmer says this: 

"I've been very busy. I've been replacing lots of the crummy old code with crummy new code."

I was reminded of such a joke when I saw a recent NASA page that rather seemed like it was trying to replace some of the old hogwash bunk told about the origin of life with some new hogwash bunk. 

The Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment done in the early 1950's which was falsely claimed to be a big advance relating to the origin of life. The coverage of this experiment in the scientific mainstream is one of the most egregious cases of deception, erroneous information and faulty analysis to be found anywhere in science-related literature. For 70 years mainstream sources have been shamelessly spouting bunk and incorrect information on this topic.

The Miller-Urey experiment used a glass apparatus (shown below) with two different glass chambers connected by tubes. The top glass chamber was filled with a mixture of gases consisting mainly of ammonia and methane. This chamber had an electrical spark unit that continually bombarded these gases with electricity. If you imagine the electrical sparks coming from a half-severed power line, you will get an idea of how this electrical spark unit worked. The lower chamber consisted of  warm water. After a week of electrical discharges delivered to the gases, amino acids were found in the water of the lower chamber.

The glass apparatus used by the Miller-Urey experiment

For seventy years this experiment has been deceptively hailed as something that had shown that “building blocks of life could naturally form,” or that before life appeared there once existed on Earth some "primordial soup" rich in such "building blocks of life." For the past 70 years, this phrase of “building blocks of life” was constantly used in discussions of the Miller-Urey experiment. But it was never an accurate or appropriate term to be using to describe the amino acids that were produced. The real building blocks of visible organisms are cells, which are built up from the building blocks of protein molecules. The real building blocks of a microscopic microbe are protein molecules, chemical units that usually consist of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way. Amino acids are merely the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled organisms, and are merely the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of human beings. So it was never accurate to be calling amino acids “building blocks of life.” Calling an amino acid a “building block of life” is as misleading as calling a tiny clay speck “a building block of a house.” Such clay specks are merely the building blocks of a brick, which is a building block of a house.

There is another reason why it is a very misleading analogy to describe amino acids as “building blocks of life.” A building block can be used in any order. If I have a dump truck dump a huge pile of bricks on the lot of my construction site, I can use those bricks in any order to create a brick wall that is the beginning of a house. But amino acids are very different. To make some functional protein, amino acids must be added in just the right order. Shuffle the amino acid sequence of a protein molecule, and you will destroy its functionality. A good and fair analogy would be to compare a protein molecule to an ordered and fine-tuned sequence such as the ordered sequence of characters that make up an essay, a chapter, or a computer program. An amino acid can then be compared to a particular character in such a sequence. Rather than using such a good analogy (appropriate for a case that requires a special arrangement that is an ordered fine-tuned sequence), the science literature has for 70 years used an inappropriate and misleading analogy in which amino acids are compared to building blocks (things that do not require some special arrangement).

Very few of the countless discussions of the Miller-Urey experiment clearly stated the important fact that the experiment had produced amino acids with an equal mixture of right-handed and left-handed amino acids, unlike what is found in earthly organisms. An article in Astrobiology magazine puts it this way:

“A curious aspect of Earth’s life forms is that they contain (with few exceptions) only left-handed amino acids. In contrast, when scientists synthesize amino acids from nonchiral precursors, the result is always a 'racemic' mixture – equal numbers of right- and left-handed forms. Scientists have been unable to perform any experiment that, when starting with conditions believed to emulate those of early Earth, results in a near-total dominance of left-handed amino acids, says George Cody, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington.”

Once the Miller-Urey experiment occurred, the world of science literature began to repeat again and again the groundless claim that such an experiment had shown that there must have been some “primordial soup” filled with amino acids. In fact, the experiment actually provided no warrant for any such claim. This is partially because the experiment had involved week-long continuous electrical bombardment of gases, something that has never naturally occurred in the history of planet Earth.

There is no reason to believe that lightning was any more common in the early Earth than it is today. The chance of someone being hit by lightning is about 1 in 700,000 per year. The chance of a particular man-sized spot being hit twice by lightning in the same year is about 1 in 14,000,000,000,000. But the Miller-Urey experiment used an electrode to provide continuous electricity for a week. During that week, very many thousands of electrical jolts were transmitted into the apparatus. In the history of Earth there has never been any area that got even a millionth of that frequency of electrical stimulation from natural lightning, which lasts for only about 30 millionths of a second when it strikes. The length of electrical stimulation in the Miller-Urey experiment was about 20 billion times longer than the length of time that any natural spot on Earth would have been electrically stimulated by lightning. This by itself is sufficient reason for saying that the Miller-Urey experiment was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. This huge problem with the experiment was ignored by 99% of the treatments of the Miller-Urey experiment in science literature. 

Another reason for doubting the relevancy of the Miller-Urey results is that the electricity was created in a closed glass apparatus chamber. Natural lightning is never created in such a closed environment, but arises instead in the open air, where there is ample opportunity for dissipation of the energy.  The Miller-Urey apparatus included a special "cold trap" that isolated the amino acids created from being disrupted by the energy source. Such a thing does not correspond to anything that existed on the early Earth. It was obvious from Day One (1953) that an experiment using so special a glass apparatus was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. But believers in an accidental origin of life just saw what they wanted to see, ignoring the utter artificiality of the experimental setup. It was partially because the paper originally announcing the experiment had contained a huge lie in its title. The title of the paper was "A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions." 

It was very obvious from the beginning that the special glass apparatus used by Miller (with its long glass tubes and special double-sphere arrangement and week-long continuous electrical bombardments) had created extremely artificial conditions unlike conditions that ever existed on the early Earth. So it was deceptive for Miller to have claimed that he had used "Possible Primitive Earth Conditions." 

Eventually more and more evidence piled up that the gases used by Miller and Urey were not the right mixture. It became more and more evident that the early Earth's atmosphere was a totally different mixture, one corresponding pretty closely to actual outputs of volcanoes (a mixture of mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, along with considerable water vapor and sulfur dioxide).

A 2011 press release preserved on a NASA site states the following:  "We can now say with some certainty that many scientists studying the origins of life on Earth simply picked the wrong atmosphere,' said Bruce Watson, Institute Professor of Science at Rensselaer."  The "many scientists" referred to include Miller and Urey.  The press release tells us that the correct atmosphere (derived from a study of volcanic emissions) would have been "an atmosphere dominated by the more oxygen-rich compounds found within our current atmosphere — including water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide."  A 2007 scientific paper says, "the early Earth is likely to have had a CO2-rich atmosphere, and not a ‘Milley–Urey'’ atmosphere, since at least 4 Ga [4 gigayears] (Canil, 1997; Delano, 2001; Kasting and Catling, 2003)."

Once it became apparent that the Miller-Urey experiment had used the wrong set of gases, a deceptive convention was adopted by writers who wanted to continue to make the phony claim that the Miller-Urey experiment was relevant to the origin of life.  The convention was to refer to something like the intention of the scientists. So in countless articles and books we would get statements such as  "Miller and Urey filled their apparatus with gases intended to simulate the early Earth."  Again and again, the reader would be left with the impression that the experiment had used gases correctly simulating the early Earth, without being told that the gases did not correctly simulate the early Earth atmosphere. The writers who have adopted this deceptive convention include many of the most well-known names in the world of science. 

A new NASA web page lets us know some of the reasons why the Miller-Urey experiment was irrelevant, but it offers a replacement idea that is just as much baloney and bunk. The page has the ridiculous title "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth." The page refers to some recent paper, and quotes one of its authors (Vladimir Airapetian) as giving us the same old baloney about the Miller-Urey experiment that people have been pushing for 70 years. We read:

" 'That was a big revelation' said Vladimir Airapetian, a stellar astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and coauthor of the new paper. 'From the basic components of early Earth’s atmosphere, you can synthesize these complex organic molecules.' ”

Not true, for Airapetian failed to mention the special glass apparatus and week-long electrical bombardment unlike anything that would have been around on the early Earth. The scientist is then immediately contradicted by the NASA page, which tells us that the Miller-Urey experiment did not use the right gases to simulate the early Earth's atmosphere. Then (oddly promoting the person it just scolded) the NASA page claims this:

"In 2016, Airapetian published a study suggesting that during Earth’s first 100 million years, the Sun was about 30% dimmer. But solar 'superflares' – powerful eruptions we only see once every 100 years or so today – would have erupted once every 3-10 days. These superflares launch near-light speed particles that would regularly collide with our atmosphere, kickstarting chemical reactions."

The 2016 paper by Airapetian was a speculative model, and I will soon explain in this post how a 2020 paper (based on hard observations) gives us data very much contradicting the speculation quoted above that the early sun would have had such superflare behavior. 

Airapetian has co-authored with quite a few other scientists a study entitled "Formation of Amino Acids and Carboxylic Acids in Weakly Reducing Planetary Atmospheres by Solar Energetic Particles from the Young Sun." In its first paragraph the May 2 NASA page "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth" refers to this 2023 paper.  In this study the authors did some experiment bombarding gases with protons, trying to simulate what might happen in a superflare hundreds of times more powerful than the most powerful flares our sun ever emits. 

The authors give no photograph or drawing of the apparatus used in the proton bombardment part of their experiment. We merely read this:

"We introduced a gas mixture of N2, CO2, and CH4 in a Pyrex glass tube (400 mL) with a Havar foil window (purchased from Nilaco Co., Japan) [38] and 5 mL of pure water. Then, the gas mixture was irradiated with a 2.5 MeV proton beam from a Tandem accelerator (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) at ambient temperature....The proton irradiation time was about 1–2 h, during which the total quantity of protons was controlled at 2 mC. The total energy deposit to each gas mixture was estimated to be 3.16 kJ. This corresponded to the input proton intensity of 1.97 × 1018 eV cm−2 s−1. The experimental input proton flux is comparable with the estimation of the proton flux at E > 10 MeV, associated with an energetic superflare based on the size distribution of solar and stellar flares."

The authors have failed to exactly or visually specify the experimental apparatus used with these proton bombardments meant to simulate superflares, and so we have no reason to assume that any realistic simulation of early Earth conditions took place in their experiments, particularly since the authors made no claim to have realistically simulated early Earth conditions. Presumably the experimental apparatus was some special gizmo unlike anything that would have ever existed on the early Earth, just as the Miller-Urey apparatus was such a gizmo. The authors have assumed "superflare events with energy ~3 × 1034 erg," which is  30 million times larger than a normal solar flare (with only 1027 erg). and 300 times more powerful than the most powerful solar flares (with only 1032erg).

What was the amino acid output from such proton bombardment? It was only negligible trace amounts. Figure 4 of the paper shows amino acids outputs. For three of the four amino acids produced, the output was less than 120 nanomoles, which you can think of as less than 120 parts per billion. For the other amino acid, the output was less than 600 parts per billion. Only 4 of the 20 amino acids needed for life were produced. 

What was the amino acid output when a realistic methane amount was used in the experimental apparatus? Figure 4 makes clear that no amino acids were produced by the "superflare" apparatus unless the gas mixture was at least 1% methane. And the 2010 paper "Earth's Earliest Atmospheres" tells us this, indicating that no such 1% methane level would have existed in the Earth's early atmosphere: 

"However, photochemical studies showed that any methane (Lasaga et al. 1971) or ammonia (Kuhn and Atreya 1979; Kasting 1982) in the atmosphere would quickly be destroyed. Meanwhile geologically based arguments, which treat the atmosphere as outgassed from the solid Earth, were taken as strongly suggesting that Earth’s original atmosphere was composed mostly of H2O, CO2, and N2, with only small amounts of CO and H2, and essentially no CH4 [methane] or NH3 [ammonia](Poole 1951; Holland 1962; Abelson 1966; Holland 1984)."

The 2020 paper "Superflares on solar-type stars from the first year observations of TESS" analyzed 25,734 solar-type stars looking for evidence of superflares.  The paper states this:

"The majority of the solar-type stars in our data set are rapidly rotating stars with stellar periodicities shorter than 10 days. Moreover, as only seven superflares are detected on Sun-like stars, we may not be able to give a convincing conclusion on the frequency of superflares for Sun-like stars."

So apparently fewer than 1 in 3000 solar-type stars produced superflares. None of the 20 stars listed in Table 5 or Table 6 of the paper have a rotation period of more than 5 days. The paper says, "it is clear that the flare frequency decreases with an increase of the rotation period." Conversely, the sun takes 27 days to rotate. Given such facts, which suggest superflares are very rare in sun-like stars and that they only occur in stars rotating much more slowly than the sun,  it is very unlikely that the sun ever produced superflares anything near as powerful as the superflares assumed in the Airapetian paper; and there is no reasonable basis for suspecting that superflares would have occurred in the early history of the solar system to an extent that would have had any appreciable effect on the amount of amino acids that could be produced. Also, there is no reason to think the early Earth atmosphere had 1% methane, and the experiment suggests without such a methane level, no amino acids would have been produced from superflares. NASA's headline of "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth" is bunk. 

The idea that superflares (destructive, disruptive events) would have "kickstarted" the origin of life (requiring vast levels of organization) should seem nonsensical to anyone who has studied the complexity of even the simplest cell. The simplest self-reproducing cell requires several hundreds of different types of functional proteins, and most of these proteins require several hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to produce a particular effect. The simplest cell requires more than 50,000 well-arranged amino acids. Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and 20 amino acids used by living things, you can get a good rough analogy by considering that the simplest self-reproducing cell requires an organization of parts as impressive as the organization of letters needed to produce a well-written 50-page book (in which each page had about 1000 letters, the same as 1000 characters).  What you would need to produce such a thing is an organizer, or an enormously strong organization effect.  Neither Miller's lightning nor Airapetian's superflares are organizers. In fact, both are the opposite of organizers.  

How can institutions such as NASA get away with "biological baby talk" headlines such as "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth"? Because such organizations have always done a very bad, no good, horrible job at educating the public about the complexity of living things. Our professors and high school biology teachers have often acted like very incompetent biology educators. And so they get away with the nonsense of talking about "building blocks of life," as if life could be assembled by components arranged in any order (like the building blocks of a wall), rather than components that have to be arranged as carefully as the letters in a well-written book.