The search of evidence of life on Mars has been a complete bust, with no convincing evidence ever being found for it. The main building components of one-celled life are protein molecules. No protein molecule has ever been found on Mars. The building components of protein molecules are amino acids. A functional protein molecule requires a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids, as unlikely to occur by chance as hundreds of twigs in a forest accidentally forming into a functional, readable paragraph. No amino acids have ever been found on Mars.
But this utter failure to find convincing evidence that life ever existed on Mars has not stopped glory-hungry scientists from trying to insinuate that they found something that could be a sign of life on Mars. An example of this is described in my July 2024 post "NASA's Groundless Boast About Finding a Potential Biosignature." We see in a NASA press release the unimpressive-looking rock below, called the Cheyava Falls rock, 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.
Credit: NASA
Today we had a NASA press conference trying to create the impression that some possible evidence for life has been found on Mars. At www.space.com today we read this about the press conference:
"On Wednesday (Sept. 10), researchers presented a study that describes how Perseverance found intriguing minerals on the western edge of Jezero Crater, in the clay-rich, mudstone rocks of a valley called 'Neretva Vallis.'
'When we see features like this in sediment on Earth, these minerals are often the byproduct of microbial metabolisms that are consuming organic matter,' Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University in New York and lead author of the new study, said during a NASA press conference held on Wednesday."
But this means little. Minerals are not fossils of life. Later at www.space.com we read this:
" 'I want to remind everyone that what we're describing here is a potential biosignature that is a characteristic element, molecule, substance or feature that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before reaching a conclusion about the presence or absence of life,' Lindsay Hayes, Senior Scientist for Mars Exploration in the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, said during the conference."
Today's press conference does not announce any new news. Nothing new has been discovered. The press conference was called to publicize a scientific paper about the Cheyava Falls rock and nearby rocks scanned in 2024. That paper has the dull title "Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." We hear no mention of any amino acids being found. Trying to boost excitement about something that is very probably no indication of life, the paper states, "In summary, our analysis leads us to conclude that the Bright Angel formation contains textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic signatures that warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures’, that is, 'a feature that is consistent with biological processes and that, when encountered, challenges the researcher to attribute it either to inanimate or to biological processes, compelling them to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life.' "
This boils down to: we found something a little funny, and it might have been produced by life, or it might not have been. That is not evidence for life. Similarly, if I find on a tree a very-old apple that looks kind of half gone, that might be evidence that a squirrel once existed to chew on the apple, or maybe it's no evidence there were ever any squirrels nearby, and maybe the apple is just half-rotted, or half-eaten by worms. But I might call that half-gone apple "a potential squirrel biosignature."
The paper "False biosignatures on Mars: anticipating ambiguity" alerted us about the type of groundless hype that would be happening, saying, "It is often acknowledged that the search for life on Mars might produce false positive results, particularly via the detection of objects, patterns or substances that resemble the products of life in some way but are not biogenic." It states this:
"What concerns us here is the risk of false positive errors in the detection of life, specifically those arising from the misinterpretation of abiotic geological and chemical features that are misleadingly life-like (rather than analytical false positives or spacecraft contamination). One reason for concern is that such errors have been frequent in the history of palaeobiology and astrobiology down to the present day."
An example of the errors the article refers to is when two NASA scientists convinced US President Bill Clinton to do a press conference announcing that life had been found on Mars, on the basis of the scientists' analysis of a meteorite believed to have come from Mars. The consensus now is that such scientists were guilty of glory-hounding pareidolia, and that they produced no real evidence that life existed on Mars.
Another scientific paper states this:
"Astrobiology’s core notion of indirectness invites the danger of false positives, as many candidate biosignatures – such as methane, oxygen, or phosphine – can arise from purely abiotic [lifeless] processes....False positives mark Astrobiology's history: the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite (McKay et al., 1996), Viking's ambiguous life detection results (Levin & Straat, 1976), Mars methane variations (Webster et al., 2015), and the controversial phosphine detection on Venus (Greaves et al.,2020)."
In addition to the four cases of astrobiology false positives discussed above, there are three cases of "visitor to the solar system" astrobiology false positives mentioned in my post here, and also the K2-18b astrobiology false positive discussed here. Add the famous case of the false alarm about Martian canals (involving Percival Lowell), and you have about ten examples of astrobiology false positives or false alarms.
We simply cannot trust any NASA officials or any Mars specialists talking about this topic, because they are examples of vested interests, people who have lots of "skin in the game" rather than impartial judges. NASA and its scientists are very much hoping that the government funds a sample return mission that will spend 10 billion dollars or more to return soil samples and rock samples that the Perseverance Mars rover has gathered up and dumped on Mars. The funding of such a mission is in jeopardy, and it is now said that it will probably never occur. So we can expect that NASA and its scientists will try to exaggerate findings on Mars, trying to make unconvincing evidence for life on Mars seem like more compelling evidence. The greater the hype, and the greater the groundless boasting of finding a "tantalizing potential biosignature," the more likely the 10 billion dollar funding will occur.
The fact remains that the chance that life ever existed on Mars is extremely low, because of the failure of all Mars missions to ever detect any proteins or amino acids on Mars. It is impossible to overestimate how much the failure to find any amino acids on Mars is a "show-stopper" for all conjectures about "potential biosignatures" on Mars. The amount of functional information in even the simplest living cell is comparable to the amount of functional information in a set of hundreds of long, well-written useful paragraphs. Speculating about life arising on a Mars without amino acids is like speculating that accidental arrangements of twigs formed many long, functional and grammatical paragraphs at some place (like the North Pole) where there are no twigs.
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