NASA's Groundless Boast About Finding a "Potential Biosignature"

Politics have often played a big part in what goes on at NASA. NASA's biggest project was the Apollo moon landing, which seemed to be launched largely for political reasons.  The Apollo project was introduced to the public in a speech made by President John F. Kennedy, a speech he made before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961. The previous month Kennedy had suffered the most embarrassing failure of his administration, the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs landing, which occurred on April 17 to April 20, 1961.  About 1400 American-trained Cuban exiles landed in Cuba, attempting to overthrow its government led by Fidel Castro. The attempted invasion quickly ended in ignominious defeat, with almost all the invaders being captured.  What Kennedy needed was a big distraction that would turn the public's attention away from the previous month's foreign policy disaster. The announcement of the moon landing project served as such a distraction. There was also geopolitics involved. The moon landing was largely an attempt to prevent the Soviet communists from gaining global prestige by becoming the first nation to land on the moon. 

Recently NASA has suffered from some embarrassing setbacks that have damaged its reputation as a "can do" center of competency. On April 15 of this year, NASA's administrator Bill Nelson gave a strange announcement suggesting that NASA's plan to return soil samples from Mars is basically in a kind of project limbo. We read this in an ABC news story from April of this year:

"During a press conference, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said although the federal space agency is 'committed' to retrieving the samples, independent reviews have estimated the project would cost between $8 billion and $11 billion and samples may not return until 2040.

'That is unacceptable to wait that long,' Nelson said. 'It's the decade of the 2040s that we're going to be landing astronauts on Mars ... the long and short of it then is that the current budget environment doesn't allow us to pursue an $11 billion architecture and 2040 is too long."

This all had a stink of incompetence about it. The reservations about the design does not surprise me in the least. NASA chose the following silly design:

(1) Land a Perseverance rover vehicle on Mars, which would have a main task of digging up soil and putting the soil in tubes that would be dumped near where the soil was dug up.

(2) Then years later send an unmanned "sample return" mission to Mars to retrieve these dumped tubes and bring them back to Earth. 

 The mission design has always seemed utterly bizarre. Why send a rover to Mars to put soil samples into tubes for later retrieval by another spacecraft, when any newly arriving spacecraft could simply dig up Mars soil at the spot it landed, rather than try to find and retrieve such tubes filled up with soil years earlier? I complained about the bad design of the mission in my February 2021 post "The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission."  Now it seems that NASA itself has woken up to how badly it bungled with its design for Mars soil sample retrievals. 

It seems that the NASA has now realized that it makes no sense whatsoever to be spending 8 to 10 billion dollars to send an unmanned sample return mission that might not return until 2040, when NASA thinks that astronauts will be walking on Mars in the decade of the 2040's.  Such astronauts could presumably bring back as many Mars soil samples as they wanted. 

So in April of this year NASA sent out how a kind of "help us!" cry, hoping some brilliant designer will help it clean up its mission design mess.  The ABC news story from April says this: "To make the mission work, NASA is requesting assistance from the NASA community, including the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), to create a new, updated mission design that 'has reduced complexity, improve resiliency and risk posture, and well as well as strong accountability and coordination.' "  You could translate this as: NASA has finally realized it painted itself into a corner, and put out a desperate cry for help, asking for some genius to extract itself from the great big design mess that it created. 

The April press conference by NASA's chief was very embarrassing for the agency. But something just as embarrassing happened this week on Wednesday. NASA announced that it is canceling an unmanned lunar project called the VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) project. NASA already spent 450 million dollars on the project, so that's 450 million dollars of US taxpayer money down the drain. 

What NASA needed was to come up with something as quickly as possible to help attract attention away from its bungling, just as John Kennedy needed something to help attract attention away from his Bay of Pigs bungling. And so yesterday, two days after the very embarrassing VIPER cancellation announcement, NASA conveniently came up with just such a distraction. On Friday NASA announced grandly that it had discovered a "potential biosignature" on Mars. The claim is groundless.  There is not the slightest reason to think that any sign of life -- living or long dead -- was actually discovered. 

We have a NASA press release with the modest title "NASA’s Perseverance Rover Scientists Find Intriguing Mars Rock." The subtitle of the press release then goes into groundless boasting mode, stating "The six-wheeled geologist found a fascinating rock that has some indications it may have hosted microbial life billions of years ago, but further research is needed."  We read this "doesn't really mean much of anything" statement:

"The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water. Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation." 

We see in the press release the unimpressive-looking rock below, which has no visual signs of life. Someone trying to suggest something like life has named some tiny spot a "leopard spot," trying to suggest something biological. The maneuver is ridiculous. The spot circled and called a "leopard spot" looks nothing like a leopard spot, and could have been formed by any of 1001 lifeless processes. 

Image credit: NASA

We then have the old "organic molecules" trick. The misleading maneuver works like this: you exploit the fact that scientists define "organic molecules" as any molecules containing carbon and some other element, even if they have nothing to do with life. You can then discuss some carbon-containing molecule with no biology relevance, and insinuate that you found something with biological relevance, by saying something like, "We found some organic molecule, and life itself is made of organic molecules."  That's a "make the dross sound like gold" trick, like someone saying, "I have a collection of metals, and metals such as gold and silver command high prices," when the metals he's thinking of are tin cans and lumps of lead in his garage. Typically, when this "organic molecules" trick occurs no mention is made of any abundance of organic molecules found. The abundance will typically be some negligible abundance such as 1 part in a billion. 

The NASA press release mentions that some "organic compounds" were found in the rock shown above, but makes no mention of what type of organic molecule was found when this rock or nearby soil was investigated. We can assume with 99% confidence that no molecule used only by living things was found, because if such a thing a found, we surely would have had a mention of the exact molecule found. Most types of organic compounds (or organic molecules) are biologically irrelevant.  

The lowest building components of one-celled life are amino acids. Cells are built from organelles, which are built from protein complexes, which are built from protein molecules, which are built by making very special sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, sequences that have to be just right for the protein to be functional. No amino acid used by living things has ever been found on Mars. This failure makes it very unlikely that Mars ever had life. To put it in baseball terms, Mars seems to have never even got a third of the way to first base in the process of building the simplest life. 

The paper here discusses chemical analysis by the Mars Perseverance rover and its SHERLOC instrument mentioned in Friday's press release. We have no mention of any amino acids found. We have no mention of any biologically relevant molecules, and the biologically irrelevant organic molecules discussed are not found in any concentration greater than 20 parts per million (Earth soil, by comparison, is between 1% and 80% organic molecules). 

There is not a single thing in Friday's NASA press release that should cause anyone to think that a "potential biosignature" has been found, or that any sign of ancient Mars life has been found. The attempt to raise up biology suspicions by calling faint little features "leopard spots" is pathetic. 

NASA has been guilty before of "crying wolf" in regard to extraterrestrial life or the origin of life. As described here, in 2019 the agency brazenly produced a page with the bogus headline "NASA Reproduces Origin of Life on Ocean Floor." The headline was entirely false, for the experiment described did not produce any living thing. No cell was created, no DNA or RNA molecule was created, and not even a single protein was created. The actual result of the experiment was a measly result: the appearance of only a single type of amino acid. In the 1990's NASA announced that it had found proof of Mars life in a meteorite it believed had come from Mars to Earth. The claim is now generally believed to be false. 

We should suspect that the latest announcement by NASA is politically motivated, and that it is no coincidence that this grand-sounding boast has been published two days after NASA announced that it had wasted 450 million dollars on a moon mission it has canceled. Grand boasts are a great way to distract attention away from "sorry, we wasted 450 million dollars of taxpayer money" announcements. 

NASA can get away with this kind of nonsense because it has done such a terribly bad job at educating people about the huge organization of even the simplest type of living things.  Since 1960 US taxpayers have paid 650 billion dollars to fund NASA since its beginning, but the agency hasn't even succeeded in educating the public about the basic realities of biology. So NASA gets away with again and again using nonsensical "building blocks of life" talk, failing to tell us that even the simplest cell is not built from simple components that can be accurately described as "building blocks," but is instead built from many different types of very complex protein molecules that each require a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids that must be in just the right sequence. 

Note the same old duplicity in the latest NASA press release. We have this quote:

"Multiple scans of Cheyava Falls by the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument indicate it contains organic compounds. While such carbon-based molecules are considered the building blocks of life, they also can be formed by non-biological processes."

No, the only type of organic molecules ever found on Mars are neither proteins nor amino acids, and are not in any sense "building blocks of life." And living things are not built from simple components that can be called "building blocks."  Even the simplest living thing is built from many types of very complex protein components requiring very specially arranged sequences of hundreds of amino acids. 

Postscript: I wrote the text above before reading any articles skeptical about the announcement. Now the journal Science has an article on the announcement that echoes some of my skepticism about it. After a subtitle saying "Some see hype over intriguing rock as plea for troubled multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return mission," we read this:

"Although there is no doubt about the scientific value of the new sample, the provocative announcement about the rock by JPL, which is desperate not to lose Mars Sample Return funding, has raised some eyebrows. As Marc Fries, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and member of the Perseverance team, posted on X, 'It should come with a conflict of interest warning sticker.' ”

At a major source of science news, we have an article senselessly promoting the rock photo as if it were something very important. A check of the writer's biography reveals him to be a "writing intern." So many of the most widely read science news articles are written by science newbies who don't understand what they're writing about.  A similar article on a similar site has a clickbait headline immediately contradicted by the text of the article. 

The mere existence of organic molecules does nothing to prove life ever existed, but when life exists, organic molecules exist in huge numbers. Whenever there's a great rarity of organic molecules on some place beyond Earth, you have a "life probably never existed there" situation. A very recent scientific paper states this, and all you have to do is put two and two together to realize the meaning for whether an actual biosignature has been found on Mars:

"Given that one of the major objectives of the Mars 2020 mission is to find and collect materials that, among other potential biosignatures, preserve organic compounds (Farley et al., 2020), the astrobiological potential of the collected samples increases with their organic content. However, the SHERLOC instrument on Perseverance has not detected unambiguous organic signals to date (Scheller et al., 2024)."