We hear these days quite a bit about "AI slop," error-containing output from AI programs. But it seems that an even worse problem is what we can call "science slop," and define as unbelievable news stories showing up on web sites or web pages claiming to give "science news."
In September 2025 NASA made an utterly groundless boast of having discovered "potential biosignatures" on Mars. NASA had a press conference that received the most massive press coverage, even though it announced nothing new. All that was being discussed was the same utterly unimpressive find announced the previous year.
The NASA press conference was devoted to trying to get people excited about the unimpressive-looking rock below, called the Cheyava Falls rock, which has no visual signs of life. 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
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.' "
The building components of one-celled life are many types of protein molecules, and the building components of protein molecules are twenty types of amino acids. Protein molecules used by living things are built from long sequences of twenty types of amino acids. Most types of protein molecules require a very special sequence of hundreds of amino acids. No amino acid used by life has ever been found on Mars. It is therefore extremely misleading and arguably deceptive to be referring to something not looking like life found on a planet without any discovered amino acids, and to be calling such a thing a potential biosignature.
I can give an analogy for how deceptive the use of such language is. Suppose you sent a spacecraft to orbit around some moon of a planet such as Jupiter and Saturn. Suppose you saw a little crater-like hole in the surface of the planet, something looking rather like this:
There would be three possibilities here:
(1) The feature might have been caused by some meteorite hitting the surface, the most common cause of craters.
(2) The feature might be a sinkhole, caused by a sinking in of a little bit of the surface, as often is observed on our planet.
(3) Or, maybe the feature was created by intelligent beings who were trying to start building a house, and were excavating as part of building the foundation of the house, and maybe the feature is a "potential signature" of purposeful engineering.
In order to consider whether item (3) is a reasonable possibility, you would need to ask questions like this:
(1) Is this moon a place that can reasonably be postulated as a place where intelligent agents live, agents who might be starting to build a house for themselves?
(2) Are there any signs of building materials around or construction equipment around, things like shovels, bricks, pipes or boards?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, then there would be no reasonable chance that the observed feature is a potential signature of purposeful engineering. In that case anyone calling the feature a "potential signature of purposeful engineering" would be a deceiver, someone whose word should not be trusted.
The situation I have described is analogous to what went on with the NASA press conference. Specifically:
(1) Just as the moon described in my analogy is a place profoundly hostile to life, Mars is a place profoundly hostile to life.
(2) Just as the crater feature described in my analogy is at a place where there are no construction materials around lending credence to the possibility of a deliberate construction job, Mars is a place where no amino acids have ever been found, a place where none of the construction components for life have ever been found.
The scientists and NASA personnel trying to persuade us that a "potential biosignature" had been found seemed as misleading as a scientist getting a photo of a mere crater, and describing it as potential signature of extraterrestrial intelligence.
What has happened is predictable. The clickbait-hungry "science news" infosystem has followed their usual "give us an inch, and we'll take a mile" policy in its treatment of the NASA press conference. Now the Internet is filled with bogus stories groundlessly claiming or insinuating that life was discovered on Mars.
Almost certainly NASA knew this would happen. The bogus stories are presumably exactly what it wanted, so that a Mars sample return mission would be funded.
Without any warrant at all, NASA and some scientists have claimed "potential biosignatures," thereby misleading us very badly. If they had been honest they would have said something like this:
What we found could have been caused by life, but also could have been caused by lifeless geological processes. Given that we have searched hard for the lowest building components of life on Mars, and never found them, failing to ever find amino acids on Mars, we must reluctantly assume that almost certainly what we found is not any sign of life.
But they did not say that. Instead they used misleading language trying to cause people without any good warrant to believe or suspect that life had been found on Mars. This is not at all the first time this happened. NASA was involved in a similar affair of "crying wolf" during the 1990's, when it got the US President at that time (Bill Clinton) to do a press conference issuing a false claim that life had probably been found on Mars.
So we should no longer regard NASA as an authority that has great credibility on the topic of extraterrestrial life. If the Mars sample return mission is funded, and NASA announces that the returned samples contain traces of life, we should be skeptical about what they tell us. We should instead suspect that anything found is the result of earthly contamination, or pareidolia by overeager NASA scientists. Ditto for NASA's missions to moons of Jupiter or Saturn. If NASA scientists ever announce they find life from any such missions, we should just roll our eyes, and say to ourselves, "On this topic you can't trust these guys as far as you can throw them."
I now read that the Mars sample return mission has apparently lost its funding. NASA's attempt to whip up interest in the mission has failed to yield the desired funding. The failure to obtain the funding suggests that executive powers may have realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded. Scientists have voiced relatively little protest about the cancellation. We can be rather sure that if scientists thought there was a good chance of detecting life by returning the Mars samples, that the scientific community would "scream bloody murder" about the cancellation. But the protest of the cancellation seems to have been faint, rather as if scientists realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.
Meanwhile, while an immoral and illegal war of aggression is raging in the Middle East courtesy of an unprovoked attack by the White House, NASA has a Big New Task it is eagerly working on: an Artemis II mission to have astronauts go in orbit around the moon. This is something that was already accomplished quite a few times more than 50 years ago, when US astronauts not only orbited the moon, but walked on the moon, and drove around the moon in a little vehicle rather like a golf cart. The question we must ask about this new Artemis II mission is the same question we must about the Iran war misadventure: why the hell are they doing that?
In a 2022 post I pointed out that NASA's web page promoting the Artemis program miserably failed to articulate a convincing rationale for the program. But at least there was a page on the NASA site entitled "Why We Are Going to the Moon." It was a fumbling, bungling attempt to explain a sound basis for the program -- but at least it was an attempt. Looking at the latest versions of the NASA pages promoting the Artemis program, I can't seem to find such a "Why We Are Going to the Moon" page. It seems that these days the guys in the Executive Branch of the US government are not very good at explaining reasons for their behavior.
Seeing that we cannot have much faith these days in the credibility of proclamations coming from the horribly-renamed US Department of War, should we have great faith in any proclamation of metaphysical significance coming from NASA?
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