The Faulty Figures in an Astrobiology Paper

 The 2022 science paper "Life beyond Earth: How will it first be detected?" by Chris Impey has some figures designed to cause us to be hopeful about the chances of detecting extraterrestrial life before the year 2035. But the figures are misleading, and the prospects of detecting such life before the year 2035 are dim. 

Let us look at some of these figures, and why they mislead us. Figure 1 in this paper is this cheerful visual:

Below are comments on some of the circles in the diagram.

• "Evidence that organic molecules form easily and readily." The trick of appealing to a supposed widespread existence of "organic molecules" is the oldest trick of astrobiologists. Saying there are  lots of "organic molecules" in outer space makes people think that outer space is life-friendly. But when scientists use the term "organic molecules" they merely mean molecules containing carbon. Most of these "organic molecules" are not components of life or any indicators of life. 
• "Evidence that planet and moon habitable locations are abundant." Before there was launched telescopes such as the Kepler telescope and the James Webb telescope, the hope was that many earth-sized planets would be found in the habitable zones around other stars. By now more than 5000 extrasolar planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. Only very few Earth-sized planets have been detected revolving around sun-like stars in habitable zones. When I ask Google how many, an AI overview lists only three (Kepler-452b, Kepler-1606b, and Kepler-1649b). So rather than using the phrase "abundant" here it might be better to use the term "rare." 
• "Evidence that Earth life can survive under a wide range of conditions." Such evidence does not tell us anything very important about the likelihood of an accidental appearance of life on another planet. 
• "Evidence that ingredients for life are widely available in time and space." It would be fallacious to argue that books can accidentally be printed in a book manufacturing plant,  on the grounds that "ingredients" for books (such as paper and ink) are widely available at such a spot. Similarly, even the simplest one-celled life is a state of very high organization, something requiring a very special engineering, not merely "ingredients." The amount of information and organization needed for even the simplest life is comparable to the amount of information and organization needed to produce a 100-page technical manual. 
• "Evidence that life appeared early in the history of the earth."  We do not know that life appeared very early in the history of the earth. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, and claims are made that there are geological signs of life dating back to 3.5 billion years. But such claims are doubtful, as they rely on what are called stromatolites, unusual-looking geological features which some claim were formed by bacteria. We see no cells or biological structures in the oldest stromatolites. The claim that very old stromatolites (older than 3 billions years) are signs of ancient life relies on a rather complicated and debatable line of reasoning. It's quite possible that they are not signs of early life, and that there are alternate geological explanations. This scientific paper says the evidence for life older than 2.5 billion years is “meager and difficult to read.” If you were to prove that life arose on Earth in the first billion years that it could have arisen, that would not tell us anything about the unlikelihood of life accidentally arising. Extremely unlikely things that might happen in any of ten time periods often occur in the first of those time periods. For example, someone may be killed by lightning during the first of ten decades that he might have been killed by lightning. But that does not tell us anything about the likelihood of being killed by lightning. 

Later we have a Figure 5 which attempts to persuade us that there is a "basic foundation" for "biomarkers" on Enceladus and Titan, two moons of Saturn.  Biomarkers have not been detected on either of these moons. Later there is a Figure 9 which has a large title of "SETI Success." So far SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been a dismal failure. 

Later we have this as Figure 10:

The figure predicts that life would be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) using "IR Spectroscopy" (infrared spectroscopy) by the year 2024. This discovery is judged to be something that would occur with "high" probability. It is now the year 2026 and no such detection has occurred. There was a false alarm announcement by a glory-seeking astrobiologist in the year 2025, but other scientists said the announcement was groundless. 

There is also no reason to think that the GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope) or that the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) will have a "high" chance of detecting extraterrestrial life, as Impey assumes in the figure above. These GMT and ELT telescopes will be observatories in Chile that will be subject to distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere, something that the James Webb Space Telescope avoids. 

It seems the underlying  assumptions of astrobiologist author Chris Impey are very wrong. Making an equally bad blunder, Impey predicted that a Mars sample return would have "high" odds of life detection. There is no basis for such optimism. Life requires many types of protein molecules, and most types of protein molecule require a very special special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. Amino acids have never been detected on Mars, and the surface of Mars is extremely inhospitable to life. Given such facts, there is no basis for thinking that a Mars sample return mission would be likely to detect life. 

It seems that astrobiologists such as Impey are people who are very  overoptimistic. A central tendency of materialists has been a tendency to vastly underestimate the complexity of living things and the complexity of minds. This tendency has led materialists to make bad predictions about when the origin of life would be understood and when extraterrestrial life would be discovered. 

So in the year 2006 on the page here chemist Robert Shapiro predicted that the origin of life would be understood within five years, this being a prediction that the origin of life would be understood by the year 2011.  Twenty years later the problem of explaining the origin of life is still a problem 100 miles over the heads of scientists. Even the simplest self-reproducing one-celled organism is a state of organization so high that we should never expect it to arise by chance anywhere in the universe. 

In the year 2015 Ellen Stofan (a chief scientist at NASA) predicted, “I think we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” It's now the year 2026, and the prediction of finding "strong indications" of extraterrestrial life by the year 2025 failed. In 2025 NASA tried to get people excited about some rocks found on Mars, using the term "potential biosignatures"; but it was purely verbal trickery and groundless hype. Nothing like any decent evidence for life had been discovered. 

In a 1964 report of the Rand Corporation a large group of  experts (largely Darwinist materialists) were asked when there would occur "creation of a primitive form of artificial life (at least in the form of self-replicating molecules)." Many of these experts gave estimates between 1980 and the year 2000. It is now the year 2026, and no such thing has happened. 

The experts were blinded by their allegiance to materialism. A proper study of the mountainous degree of organization and fine-tuned complexity in even the simplest thing would have led you to estimate that scientists would never be able to create artificial life from chemicals. But the experts did not make such a study, because they wanted to believe that self-reproduction is relatively easy to achieve.