Currently what can be called a science with no discovered subject matter, astrobiology is the study of life that originated beyond planet Earth. Currently mainstream astrobiology is getting nowhere. An example of the lack of progress is a recent paper entitled "A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz." 11,680 carefully selected stars were searched for whether scientists could find any evidence of technical civilizations nearby them. No such evidence was found.
A glaring problem with astrobiology is its exclusion of what we may call teleological considerations. Philosophically teleology has been defined as the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world. An extremely relevant consideration for astrobiologists is: is there some causal agency that may affect the chance of life appearing on other planets? This has the greatest effect on the odds of extraterrestrial life. If there is no causal agency interested in life appearing on other planets, the chance of such life appearing may be negligible. If there is such a causal agency interested in life appearing on other planets, the chance of such life appearing may be very high.
Senselessly, astrobiologists publicly claim to pay no attention to this consideration, although (for reasons I will explain) they may be paying much attention to such a question. Below are some comments on this topic.
Comment #1: Although modified by the corollary of Comment #2 below, the chance of extraterrestrial life having arisen, by virtue of only unguided chance processes, close enough to Earth to be discovered within a century, is negligible.
Even the simplest one-celled life involves an incredibly high state of organization. There is no reason to think that such a state of organization would appear by chance even given billions of planets in our galaxy and billions of years. In 2018 a paper by 21 scientists stated it this way:
"The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)."
Three scientists stated it this way:
"The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature."
There is no gradual "every little step rewarded" Darwinian way to reach the origin of life, as nothing like Darwinian natural selection can occur until life already exists. If you do not include any consideration of teleology, and regard life as always originating on a planet by chance events, you should conclude that life in the universe is so rare that we have basically no chance of discovering it in the next hundred years.
Comment #2: If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, intelligent life may be abundant in our galaxy, despite the overwhelming odds against its accidental appearance.
Here we may very broadly define "purposeful cosmic agency" as some very powerful intelligence that may or may not be divine or supernatural. An extremely important point senselessly ignored by astrobiologists is that if there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing life in the universe, then intelligent life may be very abundant in our galaxy, no matter how prohibitive are the odds against its accidental appearance. It makes no sense for astrobiologists to ignore such a point, since it helps provide a justification for their efforts, which might be a complete waste of time if no such agency exists.
What goes on is that astrobiologists endlessly repeat a very bad argument for extraterrestrial life. They endlessly repeat the claim that because there are very many planets, there must be much extraterrestrial life. This is the utterly fallacious "many tries equals many successes" argument I have been reading throughout my life. No, many tries do not equal many successes. If something is sufficiently improbable, it will never happen, no matter how many tries or chances there are for it to occur. And it is very, very easy for something to be too hard to ever occur by chance. That can happen whenever you need a special arrangement of only fifty or more components. If every person in the world spends every leisure hour of their lives throwing a deck of cards into the air, never once will there occur an event in which all 52 cards form into a house of cards.
It simply isn't true that many tries equals many successes, and whenever you need a special arrangement of many parts, it is not even true that many tries (or even trillions of tries) will cause a single success. Our astrobiologists would be more persuasive if they were to reason like this:
"Our universe suddenly began for no reason we understand, and the fundamental constants of the universe seem very fine-tuned to allow for life to exist. So we should suspect that there's some great power and mind behind the universe. And if such an agency exists, would it not want intelligent life to exist throughout its creation?"
Instead of using this powerful argument, our astrobiologists keep endlessly repeating the utterly fallacious "many tries equals many successes" argument which any good student of biological complexity should realize is fallacious. If something is sufficiently unlikely to occur by chance, and requires a very special arrangement of very many parts, such a thing will never occur by chance even if there are trillions or quadrillions or quintillions of tries, or even if there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tries. And even the simplest one-celled life requires a very special arrangement of many thousands of amino acids, as hard to achieve by chance as an ink splash forming a long well-written essay.
Comment #3: If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, that would presumably greatly increase the chance of finding intelligent life on other planets, but would probably not increase the chance of finding primitive life on places with conditions for life much worse than on Earth.
If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, there might be millions or billions of planets in the universe on which civilized life exists; but the existence of such an agency would not seem to very substantially increase the chance of finding microscopic life on very inhospitable places such as Mars. An interest in producing minds seems more plausible than some interest in producing mere microbes on some planet that can only support microbes.
Comment #4: If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, such an agency might cause all intelligent life in the galaxy to arise at roughly the same time.
I have heard countless times astrobiologists make unwarranted claims about the probable ages of extraterrestrial civilizations. Their reasoning goes something like this: (1) the universe is about 13 billion years old; (2) intelligent life could have arisen on other planets at any time in the past few billions of years; (3) therefore if intelligent life arose on some other planet, it would probably have arisen very many thousands or millions of years ago.
One astronomer using such reasoning was Carl Sagan, who began episode 12 of the original Cosmos TV series by stating, "In the vastness of the cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours." More dogmatically, at about the 1:09 minute mark in the interview here, Sagan claimed to understand the nature of humanity's status in the galaxy. He stated, “If you look at time scales, you realize that our civilization is the most backward civilization in the galaxy that can communicate.” This was just one of very many groundless misstatements made by Sagan, who would often speak incorrectly on important topics.
The argument that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, they must be millions of years older than ours is one predicated on the assumption that life appears accidentally. But the odds are so enormous against the accidental appearance of life anywhere that all notions of the accidental appearance of extraterrestrials lack credibility. Given odds so bad against the accidental appearance of life and equally steep odds against life accidentally evolving into intelligent civilized life, the only plausible possibility involving nearby civilized extraterrestrials is one in which they appeared as a consequence of some purposeful cosmic agency interested in their appearance. But there is no strong reason to assume that such an agency would be following some "random intervals" plan, and it seems just as likely that some plan would be followed of intelligent life appearing throughout the galaxy more or less simultaneously. Therefore we have no basis for concluding that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, they must be vastly older than we are.
Comment #5: The non-observation of "technosignatures" in our galaxy and the non-observation of any sign of extraterrestrials in our galaxy (along with Comment #1 and Comment #4) constitute reasons for doubting that civilizations vastly older than ours exist in our galaxy.
A civilization vastly older than ours would be expected to have a big "footprint" in the galaxy. If a single planet produced an intelligent species millions of years ago, and such a species or its ancestors persisted ever since, that might mean the colonization of most of the galaxy. Spending out spacecraft at only one-fifth the velocity of light, and founding many colonies on other planets that might themselves then send out colonizing expeditions, a single planet could colonize half of a galaxy within 10 million years. There are all kinds of astronomical engineering feats that could be done, such as the construction of Dyson Spheres to maximize the capture of energy from a star. But despite all of their efforts, astronomers can find no sign of any other civilization in our galaxy.
This failure (combined with Comment #4 and Comment #1) constitute a reason for doubting that civilizations vastly older than ours exist in our galaxy. We should not be assuming that there are probably other planets in our galaxy where there live some civilizations that arose millions of years ago or very many thousands of years ago. Such a thing would seem to be a possibility, but not necessarily a likelihood.
Comment #6: Sold as purely scientific undertakings, efforts to discover merely microscopic life on planets or moons with very bad conditions (against enormous odds) seem to be motivated by anti-teleological beliefs, and are attempts at belief system confirmation.
We can easily understand why someone would want to engage in some activity such as searching for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, or looking for so-called technosignatures which might be evidence of minds elsewhere in the universe. But a puzzling phenomenon is the persistence of very expensive activity to try to search (against enormous odds) for evidence of merely microscopic life (or traces of past microscopic life) on planets, moons or other bodies offering conditions vastly worse for life than planet Earth.
For example, NASA wants to retrieve rock samples and soil samples from Mars, in an incredibly expensive mission it estimates will cost more than 10 billion dollars. Conditions on Mars are so bad it is almost universally admitted that the planet has no life. What the proposed NASA Mars sample mission will be doing is mainly looking for evidence of past life. The chance of the mission finding such a thing is very low, because no one has even found amino acids on Mars. Amino acids are the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. Hoping to find evidence of life on a planet on which no amino acids have been found is like hoping to find books in a house in which searches for paper have failed.
Why spend so much money on such a long-shot affair unlikely to find anything of biological interest, something that will probably find no more than traces of long-dead microbes? The project is best understood as an anti-teleological research program. Astrobiologists hope that life could have originated even under the harshest conditions, such as very inhospitable conditions on Mars. Finding such a thing might then allow them to say that no great luck is required for life to originate. That's just the kind of thing you want to say if you believe that all life is an accident of nature.
So while astrobiologists claim to give zero consideration to teleology, it seems that thoughts about teleology are very much in their thinking. They want the public to give them more than 10 billion dollars for a mission that they think may be a great blow against the idea that life in the universe has occurred because of purposeful agency. Granting such a funding request (motivated by a desire to help prove one's personal belief system) would seem to be like granting a request for 10 billion dollars of public funds to look for Noah's Ark.
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