An ideal situation would be one where scientists would only speak reliably whenever they said "we must." If such a state of affairs existed, then whenever scientists had to issue an urgent warning, people would have great trust in what they claimed. For example, if it was very necessary for carbon emissions to be sharply reduced, scientists might then tell us that carbon emissions must be sharply reduced; and people would say something like this:
"So, we have been warned, and we must do as the scientists say. You know how careful scientists are about saying 'we must.' A scientist will only say that we must do something, when such a thing is unquestionably necessary."
But sadly such a state of affairs does not exist. Many scientists are very careless in saying that "we must" do some thing, and many scientists tell us that we must do something when there is no necessity at all in us doing such a thing.
A great example of scientists improperly saying "we must" appeared on August 21 of this year. On that date we had a great example of why you simply cannot trust scientists to speak objectively on topics whenever they have a vested interest in creating some idea that some type of research is important. We had an article on www.space.com entitled "Perseverance rover's Mars samples must be brought back to Earth, scientists stress." The article was referring to samples of soil and rock that have been collected on Mars by the Perseverance rover. Below is the story headline.
Below this headline we had a quote by a scientist simultaneously misspeaking and also using a very bad argument:
" 'These samples are the reason why our mission was flown,' said planetary scientist David Shuster of the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. Shuster is a member of NASA's science team for the collection and analysis of these samples."
No, gathering samples to be picked up a later Mars mission was not the reason why the Perseverance mission was flown. That mission was always an affair with a variety of undertakings, most of which consisted of a rover going around on Mars and photographing things, the release of a helicopter probe, and the analysis of soil and rock samples with a SHERLOC scientific instrument. And even if billions had been spent to run a mission with the sole purpose of collecting samples for retrieval by a later mission, that would not justify spending 11 billion dollars on a sample retrieval mission. Similarly, if your wife tells you to stop wasting money trying to build a perpetual motion machine, you do not justify more expenditures with an argument such as "I must spend $500,000 more to finish the machine, because I already spent $500,000 on it." That type of reasoning is called the fallacy of the sunk cost.
The quote in the www.space.com article has a link to another article, which gives a fuller quote by Shuster. We have some additional lines by him, in which his logic sounds even more vaporous. We read this:
" 'These samples are the reason why our mission was flown,' said paper co-author David Shuster, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of NASA’s science team for sample collection. 'This is exactly what everyone was hoping to accomplish. And we’ve accomplished it. These are what we went looking for.' ”
The article has a picture showing this supposedly grand accomplishment. We see on Mars a tube filled with dirt:
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Shuster's reasoning here (as quoted in the article) sounds as weak as a cobweb. So some dirt on Mars was put into tubes and the tubes dumped on the ground, and now we must spend 11 billion dollars or more to retrieve such tubes because the dumping of such tubes was "what everyone was hoping to accomplish"? Talk about cringe-worthy scientist reasoning.
Shuster seems to think that it was some great triumph that dirt was dumped on Mars, a triumph that must be followed up on regardless of an exorbitant price tag. The visual below seems to depict this thinking:
Senselessly, the www.space.com article tells us this about a proposed 11 billion dollar mission to retrieve these dumped tubes: "Yet, no matter how daunting such a mission sounds, it's essential for planetary science to be achieved with these Mars rock subjects." No, it is not essential at all. There is no reason to think that anything particularly interesting is in such tubes, and no reason why these particular tubes have to be retrieved.
The article then contains this extremely misleading statement:
"Now, a new research paper presents an initial analysis of some of the samples, conducted by the rover itself, to illustrate why exactly it is so vital that we bring the samples back to Earth. The research paper concerns itself with seven samples of sediment collected from the delta of the river that once flowed into the lake that filled Jezero 3.5 billion years ago.:
The statement is extremely misleading because the very paper referred to does pretty much the exact opposite of what the statement above claims. Rather than showing "why exactly it is so vital that we bring the samples back to Earth," the paper gives us reason to think that there is nothing of any great scientific interest in such samples. The paper reveals that it failed to find any sign of organic molecules in any of the samples it studied.
We read this in the www.space.com article:
"The new report describes Perseverance's examination of the sampled materials. It did not detect organic materials, but Shuster isn't downhearted. 'We did not clearly observe organic compounds in these key samples,' said Shuster. 'But just because that instrument did not detect organic compounds does not mean that they are not in these samples. It just means they weren't at a concentration detectable by the rover instrumentation in those particular rocks."
Yeah, right -- and just because I don't see any fairy castles in my photos when I photograph clouds in the sky, that does not prove that the fairy castles are not there, because they could be too high up in the sky for them to show up in my photos.
The "new report " is a scientific paper reporting an utter failure to detect anything with astrobiology potential, but it has the "give-you-the-wrong-idea" title of "Astrobiological Potential of Rocks Acquired by the Perseverance Rover at a Sedimentary Fan Front in Jezero Crater, Mars." We read in the paper that the Perseverance Rover instruments used could have detected organic molecules with amounts greater than 10 parts per million. But it found no such organic molecules. Earthly soil, by comparison, is often 5% organic molecules, or 50,000 parts per million.
The reported failure to detect organic compounds in the samples analyzed by Perseverance is an extremely strong indicator suggesting with high probability that there is nothing of any biological interest in the Mars sample tubes. The www.space.com article has misled us very badly. Instead of the scientific paper telling "why exactly it is so vital that we bring the samples back to Earth," the scientific paper has actually given us a very strong reason for thinking that it will be a waste of billions of dollars to retrieve these Mars sample tubes, which will have nothing of any biological interest. 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.
The scientific paper states the following, and all you have to do is put two and two together to realize the meaning for whether it is important to retrieve the sample tubes dumped 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)."
NASA has put the Mars sample retrieval on hold partially because people at NASA realized that soon after such a mission would be finished, astronauts might well be traveling to Mars, making the unmanned sample retrieval mission look like a waste of 11 billion dollars. That's all the more reason why there's no "must" at all in the "we must" quoted in the headline above.
Elsewhere in the article Shuster gives us this statement trying but failing to justify the claim that "sedimentary rocks are important": " 'Sedimentary rocks are important because they were transported by water, deposited into a standing body of water and subsequently modified by chemistry that involved liquid water on the surface of Mars at some point in the past,' said Shuster." This fails to give any explanation of why billions of dollars should be spent to retrieve sedimentary rocks.
What we have here is scientists damaging the credibility of scientists, by claiming "we must" when there is no compelling reason for action. Given the extreme rarity of organic molecules on Mars, and given an utter failure to find any amino acids (the simplest building components of life) on Mars, there is no reason for thinking that the retrieval of the sample tubes dumped on Mars is any kind of necessity or even an important scientific priority. The more scientists tell us "we must" when there is no "we must," the less credible scientists will be when there is some really important "we must" that they must communicate to the public.
A recent BBC article has a headline of " 'Human race needs to expand beyond Earth,' says Prof Brian Cox." In the article Cox gives us only the weakest reasoning to support such a "we must" claim. Regarding asteroid mining, he says, "it's extremely important that we do it, and as quickly as possible." No, asteroid mining is no great priority, and we can get along okay without it, by reducing metal consumption. In the article Cox says "it is probable that we are the only advanced civilization in the Milky Way at the moment, and possibly the only one that has ever existed in the galaxy." He then says this:
“If that's true, though, then our expansion beyond this planet becomes an obligation. Because if we don't do that, nobody's doing it. So if we don't go out to the stars, nobody's ever going out to the stars in this galaxy. So it becomes of overriding importance to begin to take those first steps.”
Huh? We must go out to the stars, because if we don't do it, no one else will in our galaxy? This reasoning makes no sense. Again a scientist is giving very bad reasoning to try to back up an unjustified "we must" claim. Similar reasoning might be something like this: "I must try to build a mountain-sized upside-down pyramid, because if I don't do it, no one else will."
At the "Not Even Wrong" blog, mathematician Peter Woit recently asks, "Whose job is it to explain to the public that they were misled by overenthusiastic scientists?" For years Woit has taken on the job of explaining to the public how the public is being misled by a belief community of overenthusiastic physicists called string theorists. But he has never broadened his scope to a more general treatment of all the different types of belief communities of overenthusiastic scientists who are misleading the public, largely to serve their own vested interests. He should read my 61 posts with a tag of "overblown hype" to get ideas on how he might broaden his very narrow critique which has covered only a small fraction of the overenthusiastic scientists misleading the public.
