More baloney has been written on the topics of life in outer space and the origin of life than almost any other topic. The baloney keeps getting shoveled at a breathtaking pace. For evidence of this, you need merely look at the recent stores reported in so-called "Science News" feeds.
One example is a recent story at livescience.com entitled " 'This might be the seeds of life': Organic matter found on asteroid Ryugu could explain where life on Earth came from." The story is rubbish for several reasons:
(1) Scientists do not believe that life ever existed on the asteroid Ryugu or on any other asteroid.
(2) There is no scientific concept of any such thing as a "seed of life," in the sense of something causing life to arise from non-life (with the exception of plant seeds like you might plant in your garden, and no such plant seeds were found on Ryugu).
(3) The term "organic matter" merely refers to any matter containing carbon. Even the simplest life requires a vast level of organization and a vast level of functional information. You no more get such a thing from mere matter containing carbon than you get a jet aircraft from assorted scraps of metal gathered from a junkyard.
We hear this nonsensical quote in the Livescience.com article, one coming from the co-author of a paper that fails to report the finding of any interesting subunits of living things: "' This organic matter might be the small seeds of life once delivered from space to Earth' team member and Tohoku University Graduate School of Science assistant professor Megumi Matsumoto said in a statement." The scientist is talking about the paper here, which has nothing the least bit impressive to report. The paper does not report finding even a single amino acid in the asteroid it studied.
The subunits of one-celled life are organelles. The subunits of such organelles are protein complexes. The subunits of such protein complexes are protein molecules, consisting typically of hundreds of amino acids. The subunits of protein molecules are amino acids. None of these things was found in the paper reported. So for one of its authors to be boasting about finding "small seeds of life" is hogwash. I may wonder: do today's scientists attend seminars in which they are coached in how to use trick language to make it sound like they found something important when they found nothing important?
Also recently in the science news was a bogus news headline claiming that scientists are convinced that life has already been discovered on Mars. We are given a phony news story claiming that the Perseverance rover on Mars has found some sign of life. No such sign was found. Perseverance has not even found a single amino acid on Mars. The story mentions something about some water possibly being found underground, but water does not equal life. The article links to only one scientific paper, one entitled "Ground penetrating radar observations of the contact between the western delta and the crater floor of Jezero crater, Mars." That paper uses the term "life" exactly zero times, and makes no use of the word "biological."
Late in 2023 we began seeing headlines such as this one: "JAMES WEBB SPOTS POSSIBLE SIGNS OF LIFE ON DISTANT PLANET -- THIS COULD BE A BIG DEAL." The claim was made in many a science news story that dimethyl sulfide had been detected on planet K2-18 b. The claim was not a strong one, because the relevant science paper did not flatly claim that dimethyl sulfide had been detected. It merely claimed "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide." Moreover, the paper detected a "show stopper" in regard to life: it failed to detect any sign of water.
It is generally agreed that water is absolutely necessary for any form of life of life to exist. The non-detection of water at K2-18 b is a reason for thinking that life does not exist there. But did the press stories pick up on the failure to find water? No, and one of them reported the exact opposite of what was found in regard to water. The story on www.yahoo.com very much misinformed us by stating this:
"The ability of a planet to support life depends on its temperature, the presence of carbon and probably liquid water. Observations from JWST seem to suggest that that K2-18b ticks all those boxes."
No, actually, what the paper reported is that water was not found at K2-18b.
A BBC "Science Focus" story recently gave us this very false "almost finished" narrative about research into the origin of life:
"While we don’t know exactly how life began, we have a lot of clues. Let’s start with the easiest bits: what is life made of and where did those components come from? Living organisms contain thousands of chemicals: like proteins and nucleic acids that carry our genetic information. These chemicals are complex, but we now know that their constituent parts form quite readily."
No, we do not have "a lot of clues" about life's origin. The constituent parts of proteins (amino acids) do not "form quite readily," and the evidence the article cited for such an opinion (the Miller-Urey experiment) did nothing to show that such amino acids "form quite readily," because it was not a realistic simulation of the early Earth, as I discuss here. The article also refers us to some mere computer experiment which is irrelevant because it did not physically simulate the early Earth. From such evidence the author makes the untrue claim that " the implication is that the young Earth was a factory of biological chemicals." No such implication can be logically drawn from the items cited, and there is no reason to believe that the early Earth was any such thing. The idea that billions of years ago there was some "primordial soup" filled with "building blocks of life" is a false narrative not supported by any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. And calling things like amino acids "biological chemicals" is a piece of misleading trick language designed to blur the immense gulf between lifeless chemicals and living things.
At the phys.org site we recently had the ridiculous headline "How did life get started on Earth? Atmospheric haze might have been the key." We hear of an experiment that does nothing to overturn my previous claim that no realistic experiments simulating the early Earth have established that there ever would have been any "primordial soup" filled with "building blocks of life." We read a discussion of the paper here. That paper did an experiment in which a little steel chamber filled with gas was zapped with electricity for two seconds. What's wrong with that? Well, for one, there were no small steel chambers billions of years ago. A small steel chamber is something that will exponentially exaggerate the effects of electricity jolts inside it, causing effects maybe millions of times more concentrated than you would get if the same jolt of electricity occurred in the open air. For another thing, we are told in the paper that the chamber was jolted with electricity for two seconds. We are not told how many times this jolt occurred. We vaguely hear about experiments without any listing of how many times this two-second jolt occurred. Even under the most charitable guess of the jolt occurring only once, you still have a length of time that is maybe 40,000 times longer than a natural lightning bolt, which strikes a cubic meter of space for no longer than about 50 microseconds. What is the result of this experiment that fails to realistically simulate any early Earth conditions? The result was some amino acids in a concentration of only about 1 part per million (as shown in Figure 2). Overall, the experiment helps to show how untrue are claims that lightning bolts could have produced any primordial soup rich in "building blocks of life." But the press article treats the experiment as if it did the opposite.
Then there was recently in the New Scientist a goofy headline of "Lightning during volcanic eruptions may have sparked life on Earth." The first two sentences state this:
"An analysis of volcanic rocks has revealed large quantities of nitrogen compounds that were almost certainly formed by volcanic lightning. This process could have provided the nitrogen required for the first life forms to evolve and thrive."
Here we have a senseless claim in which getting nitrogen compounds is confused with the origin of life, which is as silly as saying that all you need to get an encyclopedia is to get a tree (which has the wood pulp needed for the paper). Why do people get away with nonsense like this? It's because our biology authorities did such a very poor job of educating the public about the very high levels of organization and information in even the simplest living thing.
Some source called Science Alert is these days giving us quite a few groundless headlines, such as its recent headline "Life Spreads Across Space on Tiny Invisible Particles, Study Suggests." The story discusses no evidence for this claim, and the idea of life spreading around on dust grains crossing light-years of space is ridiculous.
The same BBC Science Focus mentioned earlier has a recent article with the title "The 4 biggest questions about alien life, answered by an astrobiologist." There is no answer to the biggest question about alien life, which is whether it exists. One of the questions is "What three things are making astrobiologists so optimistic about finding life beyond Earth?" There are no recent developments providing any good basis for astrobiologists being more optimistic about finding alien life. The three answers given are:
(1) Extremophiles -- bacteria that can survive in harsh conditions do nothing to reduce the improbability of life arising from non-life.
(2) Extrasolar planets -- to argue that extrasolar planets provide a basis for optimism about extraterrestrial life is to commit the old "many chances equals some successes" fallacious argument that astrobiologists so often engage in. Given sufficiently low odds, many chances does not make it likely that there will be even one success, and given low enough odds the chance of success may still be smaller than 1 in a billion trillion quadrillion. Abiogenesis (life arising naturally from non-life) faces just such prohibitive odds, odds so low that the existence of billions of planets in our galaxy does not change them. When some organization of matter has a probability of less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of occurring, it does not become likely to occur if there are billions of planets where it might occur.
(3) Robotic exploration of the solar system -- such exploration has provided no basis for optimism about extraterrestrial life, with the possible exception of a single 1976 Viking test on Mars that was negated by the failure to find relevant organic molecules in decent numbers on Mars, and the failure to find any amino acids on Mars.
You could just as easily write an article claiming that scientists are more pessimistic than ever about discovering extraterrestrial life, and base your article on the fact that 50 years of searches for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations have all failed, and the fact that the James Webb Space Telescope has failed to find any biosignatures despite two years of searching for them.
Then there's a recent article at the Universe Today site with the headline "Cosmic Dust Could Have Helped Get Life Going on Earth." Comically, upon opening this article I see a large ad of "Air Filtration Dust System." Some computer algorithm has judged that since I am looking at a page about cosmic dust, that I may be interested in buying some dust filter. We read this in the article:
"Although we’ve long known that cosmic dust accumulated on early Earth, it’s not been seen as a major source for early life because of how it accumulates. With comet and asteroid impacts, a great deal of prebiotic material is present at the site of the impact. Dust, on the other hand, is scattered across Earth’s surface rather than accumulating locally. However, the authors of this new work noted that cosmic dust can accumulate and be concentrated in sedimentary deposits, and wanted to see how that might play a role in the early appearance of terrestrial life."
It's the same old nonsense that has gone on for 150+ years: people trying to explain some vast level of organization by appealing to accumulation effects. Biological organisms are vastly organized, and even the simplest one-celled life would be an enormous level of organization. You do not accumulate your way to huge levels of organization. You cannot explain such organization by some "stuff piles up" scenario. Accumulation of materials cannot explain the origin of the simplest life, and accumulation of random mutations cannot explain the origin of enormously organized things such as protein molecules and cells. Inside your body are 20,000+ different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention; and most of them require a very special organization of thousands of atoms, just like a functional page in a technical manual requires a very special organization of thousands of letters.
A recent article in Nature about the origin of life is almost as bad as the articles mentioned above. We have a little candor here and there mixed with the worst kind of vague hand waving, in which the origin of life is described like this:
"In broad brush strokes, this means that gases such as carbon dioxide (the near-universal source of carbon in cells today) and hydrogen feed a network of reactions with a topology resembling metabolism. Genes and proteins arise within this spontaneous protometabolism and promote the flux of materials through the network, leading to cell growth and reproduction."
This is as silly as claiming that many well-written essays arise at ink factories because of splashes of the ink, given that proteins and genes require as many well-arranged atoms as the number of well-arranged letters in a well-written 500-word essay. The authors mention problems with their scenario, listing only minor things 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less severe than the real problems, which can be summarized as "accidents don't make complex inventions."
An article today in the Washington Post has the untrue headline "Scientists get closer to solving chemical puzzle of the origin of life." The article discusses nothing to justify such a headline. We merely hear about some chemists creating something called pantetheine (a fragment of one type of protein), but not in any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. There's also in today's science news an equally bogus headline of "Scientists reveal how first cells could have formed on Earth." No, it's just some scientists fooling around with fatty bubbles, getting empty bubbles that aren't cells (things gigantically more organized than mere bubbles).
Then there are all the scientists who announce with great fanfare some result they produced with ridiculously complex lab equipment and many purposeful experimenter interventions, and who claim that this tells us something about what could have happened naturally.
This kind of nonsense has been going on full-blast for more than 70 years. Research about the origin of life and the articles written about such research make up a long-stinking cesspool of misleading claims and groundless boasts. Very rarely, you will get some honesty from scientists on this topic. In the paper "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe, scientist Tomonori Totani stated, "The expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe." He thereby confessed that it would be very unlikely that there would be a natural origin of life (abiogenesis) even in the entire observable universe.
Lessons to be learned:
(1) You should tend to distrust sensational-sounding claims of astrobiologist researchers, particularly when they make such claims outside of their scientific papers. If such researchers ever announce discovering "biosignatures" it will probably be an example of pareidolia, of someone subjectively seeing something (in blurry, borderline, limits-of-observation hard-to-analyze data) that he was eagerly hoping to find, like someone checking his toast on 1000 days, and finally announcing he found something that looked like the face of Jesus.
(2) Don't trust science writers writing on the topic of life in outer space or the origin of life, particular anyone writing for a web site that displays ads (where misleading clickbait is now an out-of-control epidemic).
Recent untrue headlines in the science news
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