"Houston, Futility Base Here, the Boondoggle Has Landed"

Boondoggle (noun) -- "an unnecessary and expensive piece of work, especially one that is paid for by the public"  -- Cambridge Dictionary

In my February 2021 post "The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission," written just after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, I said that because of the poor design of the Perseverance mission, "you will not be hearing any 'NASA discovered life on Mars' announcement anytime in the next few years."  So far that prediction has held up. A NASA page said that the "Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life." But no such signs have been found. 

A February 2023 article on Science News has the title "What has Perseverance found in two years on Mars?" The long answer basically amounts to: nothing of interest to the general public. Some scientist named Horgan claims, "We’ve had some really interesting results that we’re pretty excited to share with the community." But in the long article we read of no interesting results.  The article tries to get us interested by statements like a statement that the Perseverance rover " has found carbon-based matter in every rock" it analyzed. So what? Carbon is an extremely common element in the universe, and is found in many lifeless places.  

There's a big item missing from that February 2023 article: there's no mention of the detection of any amino acids.  The mainstream press keeps misleading us by referring to amino acids using the inappropriate phrase "building blocks of life." One reason the term is misleading is that blocks are simple one-part things, but the twenty  amino acids used by living things are particular arrangements of between 10 and 27 atoms. A bigger reason the term is misleading because the phrase "building blocks of life" suggests that life could be created by assembling an unordered set of building blocks, just like the walls of a house can be assembled using an unordered set of bricks. But even the simplest life requires hundreds of proteins, and each functional protein requires a very specially arranged sequence of amino acids, vastly unlikely to arise by chance. An accurate analogy would be one comparing a cell to a book, each page or chapter to a protein molecule, and each amino acid to a letter in the alphabet used to write the book. You don't get life by piling up building blocks, just as you don't get books by random typing or dumping a truck load of scrabble blocks. Getting life would require a purposeful arrangement of 20,000+ amino acids, just like writing a usable books requires a purposeful arrangement of something like 20,000 letters.

So rather than calling amino acids "building blocks of life," let's call them the simplest molecular components of life. If you haven't found amino acids on a planet, your chance of finding life on that planet is very low. No amino acids have been detected on Mars. 

Table 1 of the 2023 paper here lists all of the missions that have searched for organic compounds on Mars, and exactly what they found. We find no mention of any of the molecular components of living things. There's no mention of amino acids (the components used to build proteins), and no mention of any of the chemicals used to make RNA or DNA. The organic compounds listed as being found by the Perseverance mission are merely benzene and naphthalene, neither of which is a component of living things. The largest abundance mentioned is only 300 parts per billion, about 1 part in 3 million. 

The Perseverance rover has failed to find any encouraging signs suggesting Mars may have life. But its mission designers put in its mission design a kind of "hook" that would lure more money for another Mars mission. The design had the strange plan that the Perseverance rover would dig up some soil samples and then just dump them on the surface of Mars. The idea is that such samples would be retrieved by a future sample retrieval mission. 

What kind of psychology is going on here? What were the mission designers thinking, that they could kind of light a fire under the feet of US congressmen, by using talk such as this to whip up funding for a sample retrieval mission:

"Come on guys, you've got to get going! Those soil samples on Mars have been waiting for so long for pickup! Think of how irritated you get when you even have to wait 30 minutes for a cab to pick you up!"

Now an article on the Ars Technica site has the headline "NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag—and it’s colossal."  We read this: 

"According to two sources familiar with the meeting, the Program Manager for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard Cook, and the director of the mission at NASA Headquarters, Jeff Gramling, briefed agency leaders last week on costs. They had some sobering news: the price had doubled. The development cost for the mission was no longer $4.4 billion. Rather, the new estimate put it at $8 to $9 billion. Moreover, this only represents the cost to build and test the different components of the mission. It does not include launch costs, operating costs over a five-year period, nor construction of a new sample-receiving facility to handle the rocks and soil from Mars." 

We also read this: "Byrne said most planetary scientists think the mission has only a very low chance of actually finding definitive evidence of life." Of course. If multiple Mars missions have failed to find any amino acids, as they have failed to do, then the chance of a Mars soil sample return mission showing that life exists or once existed on Mars is almost zero. 

In the comments section of the article, we hear people saying how nutty this scheme is, and how the sensible thing to do would be to just ditch the unmanned Mars sample return mission, and wait until a manned mission to Mars, at which time you could do the same soil analysis work that would be done from a sample return mission. In the world of today's science there's a crazy operating principle that you can get billions to look for things scientists hope for that have never been observed (such as life on Mars), but cannot get even a million to study very important things that have been very abundantly observed, but which scientists prefer not to believe in. So tomorrow is a scheduled launch for a billion-dollar Euclid mission that will look for dark energy that no one has ever seen, because dark energy is something that scientists yearn to see. But you wouldn't be able to get even a million to study something such as ESP which has been abundantly observed for centuries, because scientists prefer not to believe in that, and want to sweep under the rug the evidence for it. 

Another NASA project sounding ill-conceived is a just-started project called CHAPEA in which four people will live for a year in what is supposedly a simulated Mars habitat. It sounds like kind of a half-ass simulation in which the four people will be confined to an indoor area of about 1700 square feet. The project reminds me of the 1996 Pauly Shore movie Bio-Dome, which has a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 1 out of 100 rating on Metacritic. It seems nothing will be done to simulate what would be a constant worry of living on Mars: the hassle of hard-to-clean Mars dust getting inside a Mars base. The CHAPEA project won't actually be an analog for the psychological stress of a Mars mission, because any of the participants will be free to quit at any time, unlike Mars astronauts who would have no such option. Also, Mars habitation would only occur after a long space voyage, meaning the mission won't simulate how anxious people would be when starting to live on Mars after a long space voyage. People on a Mars mission would be worried about the harmful effects of radiation,  but there will be no such worries for the four "astro-nots" on the CHAPEA project.

Technology moves fast these days, and NASA probably won't be setting up a Mars base before about 2038. Why bother trying to simulate such a base using 2023 technology that probably wouldn't even be used for the actual Mars base? And if you're serious about landing people on Mars, why do an unmanned sample return mission that uses up lots of the money that might be used for such a manned Mars landing?

Postscript: In the middle of July 2023 the press is doing what is has so often done, giving us lying headlines talking about "building blocks of life" on Mars. The molecules they refer to are biologically irrelevant molecules not used by living things. They are neither amino acids nor any "building blocks of life."