When such triumphal legends are socially constructed, what typically occurs is that stakeholders with vested interests begin endlessly reciting boastful narratives that serve their ideological needs and economic interests. If you were an atheist biologist in the second half of the nineteenth century, it very much served your economic interests to start telling the story that biologists are Grand Lords of Explanation who have an answer to deep mysteries such as how the human species originated. And if you were such an atheist biologist, it very much served your ideological interests to start telling the narrative that human origins had been naturally explained by processes understood by scientists.
This year we saw an attempt to socially construct the triumphal legend that NASA found some sign of life on Mars. The boast that such a sign of life was found is as groundless as the boast that Charles Darwin figured out how species originated or how mankind originated. The claimed evidence for life on Mars is about as weak as any evidence you could find. Zero evidence has been produced of any biological complexity. All that was found was some slightly funny-looking rock or rocks with features that could easily be the result of mere lifeless geological processes. But using "give us an inch, and we'll take a mile" tactics, NASA and the ever-credulous "science news" press has attempted to exaggerate this finding into some "sign of life."
The original claim was that a "potential biosignature" was found. It means very little to have something that you can call a "potential biosignature." I will give an example. Suppose a crater is observed on the Moon. There are three possible explanations:
(1) Maybe some meteorite hit the Moon ages ago, producing the crater.
(2) Maybe some geological process produced a kind of sinkhole effect to create the crater.
(3) Or, maybe there are living beings on the Moon, and maybe the crater was caused when they were digging up an area while trying to lay a foundation for a house.
So a crater on the Moon qualifies as a "potential biosignature." But that means basically nothing. In this case the non-biological explanations are far more plausible. A crater is no sense at all a "sign of life" on the Moon.
In such cases, you have to factor in the habitability context. The Moon is an airless rock in which no signs of life or any building component of life has ever been found. So within the habitability context, we must say: while a crater on the Moon could conceivably have been dug by extraterrestrials, it almost certainly was not, given how inhabitable the Moon is.
And in regard to Mars, we must do the same factoring in of the habitability context. Mars is an inhabitable planet with only the thinnest atmosphere. An enormously important fact is that amino acids have never been found on Mars. Amino acids are the building components of protein molecules, and many types of proteins are required for life to exist. The non-discovery of amino acids on Mars is an extremely strong reason for thinking that life never existed on Mars. Properly factoring in the habitability context in this case, we must say: with extremely high likelihood, the claimed "potential biosignatures" on Mars were not produced by life, and are not any signs that life ever existed on Mars.
Just as the social construction of the Darwinist triumphal legend was fueled by the economic and ideological vested interests of those who helped build up this groundless legend, the social construction of the "signs of life " triumphal legend was fueled by the economic and ideological vested interests of those who helped build up this groundless legend. The vested interests are these:
(1) Before the press conference announcing the "potential biosignatures" on Mars, NASA was in a position where it looked like funding was going to be cancelled for its proposed 10-billion-dollar mission for returning soil samples and rock samples from Mars. What better way to gin up interest in such a future mission than by announcing without a sound basis that "potential biosignatures" had been found on Mars?
(2) Atheist scientists have for a very long time had an ideological yearning for the discovery of extraterrestrial life, particularly in some inhospitable place such as Mars. They have claimed that if such life was discovered, it would show that the accidental origination of life is "inevitable" rather than some special event requiring divine guidance.
(3) The web sites driving the social construction of the groundless "sign of life found on Mars" legend have a very big economic motivation to produce "science news" web pages ginning up such a legend. Headlines such as "NASA finds signs of life on Mars" are an example of clickbait. When you click on such headlines, you will go to ad-filled pages that generate revenue for the web sites that show such pages.
The latest example of credibility-squandering "crying wolf" astrobiologists can be found in a New York Post story with this clickbait headline:
" 'Phenomenal’ new evidence reveals Saturn’s moon ‘ticks all the boxes’ for alien life: scientists"
In a pun, the story says that scientists are "over the moon" about something they observed. But it's just another example of scientists getting groundlessly excited over "nothing special" results. What happened is that the Cassini space probe made a reading after flying by Saturn's moon Enceladus. Nothing of any great interest was found. The results are reported in the scientific paper here. None of the chemical constituents of protein molecules were found, because no amino acids were found. None of the chemical constituents of DNA or RNA were found, because no nucleobases acids were found. The paper confesses that no amino acids have ever been found on or near Enceladus, because it says this: " Black boxes refer to compounds that have not yet been detected on Enceladus, but would be significant either in the context of astrobiology (for example amino acids) or as intermediates between other detected compounds (for example cyanoalkynes)."
All that were found were some carbon-containing molecules that are not any of the building components of living things. "Ticks all the boxes?" More like: "ticks none of the boxes."
Acting just the author had no understanding of the key point that "organic molecules" merely means "containing carbon" and not "related to life," the Guardian has a similar groundless hype article, one entitled "Prospect of life on Saturn’s moons rises after discovery of organic substances." We have this "give me an inch, and I'll take a mile" quote from a scientist:
"Dr Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist at Freie University Berlin and lead author of the work, said the results increased the known complexity of the chemistry that is happening below the surface of Enceladus. 'When there is complexity happening, that means that the habitable potential of Enceladus is increasing right now,' he said."
No, it sure as hell means no such thing. Life is incredibly complex, but discovering something a little more complex than what you had previously found at some outer space location does not by itself mean that the habitability of a moon or planet is increased, nor does it increase the likelihood of life arising there. For example, the surface of a lifeless moon may be smooth, but meteorite falls over a billion years may add lots of craters, making the surface of that moon more complex. That does nothing to increase that moon's habitability. It is not just complexity that leads to life, but the most enormously specialized and well-arranged and well-engineered complexity.
There is nothing very new in the latest story on Enceladus. It is little more than just a repeat of what was reported in 2019. In a 2019 blog post I reported on very similar groundless hype, describing how an analysis of water plumes from Enceladus had failed to show any amino acids, but was being wrongly described by the press as being a promising indicator suggestive of life. Astrobiologists keep doing the same old "crying wolf" tricks of trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, and our ever-credulous "science news" press keeps falling for this baloney.
The lying about life in outer space grows ever more brazen. One recent story claimed that Enceladus "shows major signs of life." That is a complete fiction. The molecules supposedly detected are not components of life, and are in no sense whatsoever signs of life.
Similar fictions were present in a recent press account about the observation of ethanol in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our galaxy. The headline of the story referred to the discovery of "ingredients of life," a claim very misleading, as creatures such as humans do not need ethanol, but may merely drink it in an alcoholic beverage. The text of the article then went into downright deception, by referring to the chemicals as "building blocks of life." None of the chemicals mentioned were any type of building components of living things.
What we have these days is a "science news" ecosystem that incentivizes poor science scholarship and scientific illiteracy displayed by so-called science journalists. An example was how the Fake News headline "Human DNA detected in 2 billion year old meteorite" appeared on Yahoo News, grossly misinforming countless people. The reported discovery involving the tiniest microscopic traces (along the lines of 1 part in a billion) was a mere report of a discovery of amino acids. The writer apparently did not know the difference between human DNA and the tiniest amino acids. The headline involves the same type of stupidity and science illiteracy as you might be guilty of you claimed that trees contain inside them bestseller novels, on the basis that bestseller novels are printed from paper made from wood pulp made from trees.
Like so much of the Fake News that we see on our "Science News" sites, the story was not any actual news at all, but an absurdly bungled discussion of a paper co-authored by Glavin that appeared almost a year earlier, in January 2025. The paper claimed to have detected only the most minute traces of amino acids in a sample a spacecraft gathered from an asteroid (Bennu). The most abundant protein-related amino acid found (glycine) was found at a level of only 44 nanomoles per gram, a negligible amount of only about .00000004 moles per gram. All other protein-related amino acids were found at a level of less than 5 nanomoles per gram. I discuss in my post here why the reported levels of amino acids and nucleobases are so low that we can have no confidence at all that any amino acids and nucleobases were detected in the asteroid Bennu. When the reported levels are so low, a more likely explanation is that they all come from earthly contamination; and the paper states that "laboratory contamination is a possible explanation." Here is a quote from that post:
"The paper here ("OSIRIS-REx Contamination Control Strategy and Implementation") tells us about methods to prevent microbes and amino acids from existing on the Osiris/REx spacecraft that gathered the sample from the asteroid Bennu. It claims, 'To return a pristine sample, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampling hardware was maintained at level 100 A/2 and <180 ng/cm2 of amino acids and hydrazine on the sampler head through precision cleaning, control of materials, and vigilance.' This is a mention of some standard of cleanliness that was a target level, and we have no guarantee that such a target level of cleanliness was actually obtained. Moreover, the standard of cleanliness mentioned is less than 180 nanograms per square centimeter. Under such a standard, we might expect that you would get tiniest trace amounts results as reported by Glavin (no better than 44 nanomoles per gram) from trace amounts from Earth that were left on the spacecraft when it reached the asteroid Bennu. Or, if such a standard had been followed after samples had been returned, we might have easily got the tiny trace amounts of amino acids reported by Glavin, purely from earthly contamination after the samples had been returned."
If you want another example in the recent headlines of a scientist "crying wolf" about extraterrestrial life, you can probably find it in the professor whose claims about a particular comet have been so dubious that I am tempted to call them Cambridge Comet Comedy. It's kind of a deal where all the other astronomers see a comet, but this guy tries to make it sound like a spaceship. The guy I refer to is the same guy who launched an expedition to dredge up tiny specks of metal from the ocean, and who called this little sea voyage an "interstellar expedition." The specks he dredged up were the most ordinary run-of-the-mill little metallic specks, but he tried to suggest that they were remnants of an interstellar spaceship. Apparently this guy thinks that super-advanced extraterrestrials capable of traveling between stars would be so stupid that they would not have their spaceship come within 150 million miles of the only inhabited planet in a solar system they were exploring.
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