An Astronomer's Unhistorical Description of the Search for Extraterrestrials

 An article at the site BigThink.com is entitled "David Kipping on how the search for alien life is gaining credibility." We have an interview with an astronomer who claims that the search for life on other planets is gaining credibility. Kipping fails to give a single decent reason backing up such a claim. The reality is that the credibility of astrobiologists may be dwindling, because some astrobiologists keep "crying wolf" announcing false alarms, by wrongly insinuating that they found signs of extraterrestrial life or extraterrestrial intelligence when no such signs were found. Examples of this are discussed here and here and here and here.  

We have this exchange in which the interviewer (Adam Frank) refers to the Fermi Paradox, the "where is everybody?" paradox that despite the existence of so many planets revolving around other stars, no extraterrestrial life has been found. The mention of SETI refers to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which has been primarily conducted by using big radio telescopes to search for radio signals from civilizations on other planets.  

Frank: Let’s pivot to the Fermi paradox: If life is common, where is everybody?

Kipping: The key is to stick to ground truths. We haven’t detected technosignatures, but SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky. So we can’t conclude much yet.

SETI has been woefully underfunded? SETI has "only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky"? These statements are very false. 

The fact is that by now SETI has been very well-funded. The fact is that SETI searches for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations have scanned the sky so thoroughly that every portion of the sky has been searched multiple times. Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

So what on Earth was Kipping doing claiming that "SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky"? Let us be charitable, and not say Kipping was lying. We'll just speculate that maybe he had a fleeting case of what we may call "astrophysical amnesia," and that he forgot very badly about the history of SETI searches for extraterrestrials. 

Maybe severe frustration caused a recall problem

Astrobiologists will not gain credibility when they misspeak so very badly about the history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And astrobiologists will not gain credibility by repeatedly  "crying wolf," and doing thing such as trying to get people excited about unimpressive rock results on a planet such as Mars where amino acids (the building components of the building components of one-celled life) were never even discovered. 

It's not rare for scientists to speak as if they had amnesia about previous research efforts. Scientists routinely speak as if they had the most severe retrograde amnesia regarding research efforts in parapsychology. Such efforts searching for evidence of paranormal phenomena have been producing positive results for 200 years, with serious research on the paranormal stretching back all the way to the 1825-1831 commission of the French Royal Academy of Science, which found resoundingly in favor of the reality of clairvoyance, a result replicated by innumerable later observations of physicians and professors in the 19th century and early 20th  century.  Innumerable papers and books written by distinguished doctors and scientists have thoroughly documented the reality of paranormal phenomena. Extremely convincing experiments carried out by university professors have well-proven the reality of things such as telepathy and ESP, as discussed here, here and here.  But a large fraction of scientists seem to have a severe retrograde amnesia about such research. For a typical scientist of this type, it is as if every word he heard about research results on this topic simply went in one of his ears and out the other. 

Astronomers very often make very bad misstatements when talking about extraterrestrial life, statements as false as the statement I recently read in which a well-known and frequently misspeaking astronomy figure claimed that everyone who has studied the topic of extraterrestrial life agrees that extraterrestrials exist. To the contrary, among those who have deeply studied the vast amount of organization and functional information needed for even the simplest life and the stratospheric additional level of organization and fine-tuned information-rich anatomy and biochemistry engineering needed to produce large mobile organisms, very many have concluded that we should not expect extraterrestrials to have arisen by unguided processes anywhere else in the observable universe. Again and again we hear astronomers making senseless insinuations that the question of whether intelligent extraterrestrials exist all boils down to the simple matter of how many solar systems there are. That is a hugely ignorant type of thing to insinuate, as that question involves very many other extremely deep and complex matters, such as the accidentally unachievable component interdependence within organisms as complex as human bodies, whether there is a superhuman intellect working in the universe to overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds against the accidental appearance of a species such as ours, and the very deep topic of whether any possible arrangement of matter in a brain can explain the appearance of creatures with the type of mental capabilities that humans have (capabilities far richer than just memory, intelligence and creativity). The latter topic is one of oceanic depth, and the typical astronomer barely even wades his feet in that ocean. 

Astrobiologist Tries to Persuade Us SETI Is Mainly About Learning About Ourselves

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) as practiced by scientists has been a huge failure. Among its attempts were these:

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SETI project surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

What do you do if you are an empty-handed astrobiologist with nothing to show for all the efforts looking for extraterrestrial intelligence? Maybe you try changing the depiction of what your search was all about.  That is what astrobiologist Michael L. Wong tries doing, in an article entitled "What Searching For Aliens Reveals About Ourselves." So we get something that sounds rather like "it wasn't really about searching for extraterrestrials, it was more about discovering something about ourselves."  It's rather like what we might get from a college student who dropped out of college in his third year, after his parents had spent $60,000 funding his studies. Such a student might say, "It wasn't really about getting a college degree, it was more a journey of self-discovery." 

Rather laughably, Wong says that when people complain that he and and his colleagues have not found life in  space, he replies by saying "you are life in space" and "we are all life in space."  That sounds rather like someone complaining to a dropout that the dropout failed to get a degree, and the dropout responding, "But I have a degree -- 98 of them," referring to his body temperature. 

Wong conveniently fails to mention 65 years of failed searches for extraterrestrial civilizations, searches that used radio telescopes to search for radio messages from such civilizations. He states, "There is likely to be one pileup of civilizations that don’t last very long — those that were 'too dumb' — and a second pileup of civilizations that somehow figured it out, so to speak." But why would someone conclude that such a "pileup" of successful extraterrestrial civilizations has occurred, given that all searches for such civilizations have failed?

We have some "science teaches" misuse of language in which groundless dogmas are passed off as something science teaches. Wong states, "Science teaches us that evolutionary history is rife with major transitions to brand-new states of being: eukaryogenesis, multicellularity, sociality." No, science with a capital S does not teach us that, and such things are not explicable by any theory of natural evolution.  Evolutionary theory is Darwin's theory that things happen only from gradual transitions, from an accumulation of accidental variations. Such a theory has no explanation for any of the three things Wong mentioned.  "Nature makes no leaps" was Darwin's mantra, and his theory cannot explain "major transitions to brand-new states of being." 

Eukaryogenesis is an imagined transition from very organized cells (prokaryotes) to gigantically organized cells (eukaryotes) a thousand times more organized.  Darwinism does nothing to explain such a transition, and the people who speculate about such a transition make appeals to non-Darwinian and non-evolutionary combination accidents that would have been sudden miracles of luck if they had occurred. Multicellularity (a transition from one-celled organisms to visible organisms with organ systems and limbs) is beyond any Darwinian explanation, and cannot be explained by any process of gradual transition. The reference to sociality is a reference to the ability to communicate by language, an aspect of the human mind. The co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) wrote a very clear essay (which you can read here) arguing that natural selection was incapable of explaining the human mind. Nothing in evolutionary theory explains the origin of language, which is a gigantic unsolved problem. 

Wong claims that astrobiology (the search for extraterrestrials) has taught us these things:

"Astrobiology teaches us about our strengths, which derive from relationships that are both obvious and subtle. It teaches us about our fragility — just around 62 miles of air separates us from the blackness of space. From it, we learn more about where we came from — our humble beginnings as single-celled organisms swimming in Earth’s early oceans — and who we are, whether incessant explorers, persistent dreamers or inevitable storytellers. Astrobiology teaches us about our planetary belonging — Earth is our home, a pale blue dot that serves as our perch for peering into the cosmos."

None of these things are taught us by astrobiology, the search for life in space.  As for the phrase "our humble beginnings as single-celled organisms swimming in Earth's early oceans," we do not know that humans are descended from single-celled organisms that swam in the ocean, and such organisms were in no sense us. Astrobiology does nothing to establish the dogma of common descent that Wong refers to here.  We certainly did not learn from astrobiology that Earth is our home. Humans knew that fact before anyone tried to search for life in space. Astrobiology did not teach us that there is a mere 62 miles of atmosphere between the surface and outer space, something that was learned before astrobiology started. 

There is a very strong argument to be made that astrobiology has taught us something important about ourselves: that we are a very, very special type of creature. Very expensive multiyear searches for intelligent life in space (conducted over 65 years) never succeeded.  Scientists have not found intelligent life in space, and they have also failed to find any sign of life in space. A reasonable inference from such search failures is the inference that the human species is even more special and more of a miracle than anyone dreamed before astrobiology got started. Another reasonable inference or suspicion from such search failures is the inference that the accounts of scientists such as Wong about  how  we got humans and earthly life are not correct, and that both the arising of life on a planet and the arising of mobile intelligent life on a planet require miracles of biological organization or wonders of mind origination beyond the reach of chance processes. But astrobiologists such as Wong have failed to learn the lesson of the  search failures of astrobiologists. 

In this sense they are similar to two other types of scientists: neuroscientists and geneticists. Neuroscientists around 1950 were confident that one day we would be able to read memories from brains.  Geneticists around 1950 were confident that a study of DNA and its genes would discover some blueprint or program or recipe for building a human body.  But neither of these things was found. Brain tissue from very many thousands of humans has been scanned with the most powerful microscopes, and no one ever discovered any trace of learned human knowledge in such brain tissue, not even the number 6 or the word "cat" or the word "America." The most exhaustive analysis of human DNA has occurred, in huge billion-dollar projects such as the Human Genome Project. No one ever found any blueprint or recipe or program for making a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells, contrary to many misleading claims made on this topic. 

Neuroscientists and geneticists totally failed to learn from their search failures. One reason is that the search failures suggested ideas that such people did not want to believe in.  The failure to find any trace of learned knowledge in brain tissue suggested that brains do not store memories, contrary to the dogmas of neuroscientists. The failure to find in DNA or its genes any specification for making a human body or any human organ or any human cells suggested that the physical origin of every adult human is a miracle of organization beyond the understanding of mechanistic science.  Because scientists did not want to believe in the lessons taught by these search failures, scientists failed to learn from these search failures. 

And so it is for the astrobiologists, who fail to learn anything from 65 years of astrobiology search failures.   

The Senseless Exclusion of Teleological Considerations From Astrobiology

Currently what can be called a science with no discovered subject matter, astrobiology is the study of life that originated beyond planet Earth. Currently mainstream astrobiology is getting nowhere. An example of the lack of progress is a recent paper entitled "A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz." 11,680 carefully selected stars were searched for whether scientists could find any evidence of technical civilizations nearby them. No such evidence was found.

A glaring problem with astrobiology is its exclusion of what we may call teleological considerations. Philosophically teleology has been defined as the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world. An extremely relevant consideration for astrobiologists is: is there some causal agency that may affect the chance of life appearing on other planets? This has the greatest effect on the odds of extraterrestrial life. If there is no causal agency interested in life appearing on other planets, the chance of such life appearing may be negligible.  If there is such a causal agency interested in life appearing on other planets, the chance of such life appearing may be very high. 

Senselessly, astrobiologists publicly claim to pay no attention to this consideration, although (for reasons I will explain) they may be paying much attention to such a question. Below are some comments on this topic. 

Comment #1: Although modified by the corollary of Comment #2 below, the chance of extraterrestrial life having arisen,  by virtue of only unguided chance processes, close enough to Earth to be discovered within a century, is negligible. 

Even the simplest one-celled life involves an incredibly high state of organization. There is no reason to think that such a state of organization would appear by chance even given billions of planets in our galaxy and billions of years.  In 2018 a paper by 21 scientists stated it this way:

"The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." 

Three scientists stated it this way:

"The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature."

There is no gradual "every little step rewarded" Darwinian way to reach the origin of life, as nothing like Darwinian natural selection can occur until life already exists.  If you do not include any consideration of teleology, and regard life as always originating on a planet by chance events, you should conclude that life in the universe is so rare that we have basically no chance of discovering it in the next hundred years. 

Comment #2: If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, intelligent life may be abundant in our galaxy, despite the overwhelming odds against its accidental appearance. 

Here we may very broadly define "purposeful cosmic agency" as some very powerful intelligence that may or may not be divine or supernatural. An extremely important point senselessly ignored by astrobiologists is that if there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing life in the universe, then intelligent life may be very abundant in our galaxy, no matter how prohibitive are the odds against its accidental appearance.  It makes no sense for astrobiologists to ignore such a point, since it helps provide a justification for their efforts, which might be a complete waste of time if no such agency exists. 

What goes on is that astrobiologists endlessly repeat a very bad argument for extraterrestrial life.  They endlessly repeat the claim that because there are very many planets, there must be much extraterrestrial life.  This is the utterly fallacious "many tries equals many successes" argument I have been reading throughout my life.   No, many tries do not equal many successes.  If something is sufficiently improbable, it will never happen, no matter how many tries or chances there are for it to occur. And it is very, very easy for something to be too hard to ever occur by chance. That can happen whenever you need a special arrangement of only fifty or more components.  If every person in the world spends every leisure hour of their lives throwing a deck of cards into the air, never once will there occur an event in which all 52 cards form into a house of cards.   

It simply isn't true that many tries equals many successes, and whenever you need a special arrangement of many parts, it is not even true that many tries (or even trillions of tries) will cause a single success. Our astrobiologists would be more persuasive if they were to reason like this:

"Our universe suddenly began for no reason we understand, and the fundamental constants of the universe seem very fine-tuned to allow for life to exist. So we should suspect that there's some great power and mind behind the universe. And if such an agency exists, would it not want intelligent life to exist throughout its creation?"

Instead of using this powerful argument, our astrobiologists keep endlessly repeating the utterly fallacious "many tries equals many successes" argument which any good student of biological complexity should realize is fallacious. If something is sufficiently unlikely to occur by chance, and requires a very special arrangement of very many parts,  such a thing will never occur by chance even if there are trillions or quadrillions or quintillions of tries, or even if there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tries.  And even the simplest one-celled life requires a very special arrangement of many thousands of amino acids, as hard to achieve by chance as an ink splash forming a long well-written essay. 

Comment #3: If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, that would presumably greatly increase the chance of finding intelligent life on other planets, but would probably not increase the chance of finding primitive life on  places with conditions for life much worse than on Earth. 

If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, there might be millions or billions of planets in the universe on which civilized life exists; but the existence of such an agency would not seem to very substantially increase the chance of finding microscopic life on very inhospitable places such as Mars. An interest in producing minds seems more plausible than some interest in producing mere microbes on some planet that can only support microbes. 

Comment #4:  If there is some purposeful cosmic agency interested in producing intelligent life in the universe, such an agency might cause all intelligent life in the galaxy to arise at roughly the same time. 

I have heard countless times astrobiologists make unwarranted claims about the probable ages of extraterrestrial civilizations. Their reasoning goes something like this: (1) the universe is about 13 billion years old; (2) intelligent life could have arisen on other planets at any time in the past few billions of years; (3) therefore if intelligent life arose on some other planet, it would probably have arisen very many thousands or millions of years ago.  

One astronomer using such reasoning was Carl Sagan, who began episode 12 of the original Cosmos TV series by stating,  "In the vastness of the cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours."  More dogmatically,  at about the 1:09 minute mark in the interview here,  Sagan claimed to understand the nature of humanity's status in the galaxy. He stated, “If you look at time scales, you realize that our civilization is the most backward civilization in the galaxy that can communicate.” This was just one of very many groundless misstatements made by Sagan, who would often speak incorrectly on important topics.  

The argument that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, they must be millions of years older than ours is one predicated on the assumption that life appears accidentally.  But the odds are so enormous against the accidental appearance of life anywhere that all notions of the accidental appearance of extraterrestrials lack credibility. Given odds so bad against the accidental appearance of life and equally steep odds against life accidentally evolving into intelligent civilized life, the only plausible possibility involving nearby civilized extraterrestrials is one in which they appeared as a consequence of some purposeful cosmic agency interested in their appearance.  But there is no strong reason to assume that such an agency would be following some "random intervals" plan, and it seems just as likely that some plan would be followed of intelligent life appearing throughout the galaxy more or less simultaneously.  Therefore we have no basis for concluding that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, they must be vastly older than we are. 

Comment #5: The non-observation of "technosignatures" in our galaxy and the non-observation of any sign of extraterrestrials in our galaxy (along with Comment #1 and Comment #4) constitute reasons for doubting that civilizations vastly older than ours exist in our galaxy. 

A civilization vastly older than ours would be expected to have a big "footprint" in the galaxy. If a single planet produced an intelligent species millions of years ago, and such a species or its ancestors persisted ever since, that might mean the colonization of most of the galaxy. Spending out spacecraft at only one-fifth the velocity of light, and founding many colonies on other planets that might themselves then send out colonizing expeditions, a single planet could colonize half of a galaxy within 10 million years. There are all kinds of astronomical engineering feats that could be done, such as the construction of Dyson Spheres to maximize the capture of energy from a star.  But despite all of their efforts, astronomers can find no sign of any other civilization in our galaxy. 

This failure (combined with Comment #4 and Comment  #1) constitute a reason for doubting that civilizations vastly older than ours exist in our galaxy. We should not be assuming that there are probably other planets in our galaxy where there live some civilizations that arose millions of years ago or very many thousands of years ago.  Such a thing would seem to be a possibility, but not necessarily a likelihood. 

Comment #6: Sold as purely scientific undertakings, efforts to discover merely microscopic life on planets or moons with very bad conditions (against enormous odds) seem to be motivated by anti-teleological beliefs, and are attempts at belief system confirmation.  

We can easily understand why someone would want to engage in some activity such as searching for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, or looking for so-called technosignatures which might be evidence of minds elsewhere in the universe. But a puzzling phenomenon is the persistence of very expensive activity to try to search (against enormous odds) for evidence of merely microscopic life (or traces of past microscopic life) on planets, moons or other bodies offering conditions vastly worse for life than planet Earth.  

For example, NASA wants to retrieve rock samples and soil samples from Mars, in an incredibly expensive mission it estimates will cost more than 10 billion dollars.  Conditions on Mars are so bad it is almost universally admitted that the planet has no life.  What the proposed NASA Mars sample mission will be doing is mainly looking for evidence of past life. The chance of the mission finding such a thing is very low, because no one has even found amino acids on Mars. Amino acids are the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. Hoping to find evidence of life on a planet on which no amino acids have been found is like hoping to find books in a house in which searches for paper have failed. 

Why spend so much money on such a long-shot affair unlikely to find anything of biological interest, something that will probably find no more than traces of long-dead microbes? The project is best understood as an anti-teleological research program. Astrobiologists  hope that life could have originated even under the harshest conditions, such as very inhospitable conditions on Mars.  Finding such a thing might then allow them to say that no great luck is required for life to originate.  That's just the kind of thing you want to say if you believe that all life is an accident of nature. 

So while astrobiologists claim to give zero consideration to teleology, it seems that thoughts about teleology are very much in their thinking. They want the public to give them more than 10 billion dollars for a mission that they think may be a great blow against the idea that life in the universe has occurred because of purposeful agency.  Granting such a funding request (motivated by a desire to help prove one's personal belief system) would seem to be like granting a request for 10 billion dollars of public funds to look for Noah's Ark.  

A Cautious 7-Step Scale for Astrobiology, But the Opposite for Earthly Biology

 At a recent NASA page we read the following:

"NASA scientists are encouraging the scientific community to establish a new framework that provides context for findings related to the search for life. Writing in the journal Nature, they propose creating a scale for evaluating and combining different lines of evidence that would ultimately lead to answering the ultimate question: Are we alone in the universe?"

The page describes a strategy to avoid some embarrassing fiasco like happened with the notorious BICEP2 study, when scientists announced they had made a discovery of great fundamental importance, only to end up retracting such claims within the next six months or so. The strategy will involve seven steps that must be reached before an announcement will be made that extraterrestrial life has been discovered. 

A visual on the NASA page illustrates the idea:

Credits: NASA/Aaron Gronstal

A paper discussing this "progressive scale" gives us an example of such a scale, from the world of astronautical engineering. Step 1 is "basic principles observed and reported." Step 2 is a "technology concept." Step 3 is a "proof of concept." Step 4 is "validation in a laboratory environment." Step 6 is the creation of a prototype.  Step 7 is the demonstration of a prototype in a space environment. Step 8 is an "actual system flight" in a test. Step 9 is "actual system flight" through repeated non-test operations. 

The paper then discusses a Confidence of Life Detection scale or CoLD, which is illustrated in its Figure 1. On the NASA page the first three steps of this scale are described like this:

"At the first step of the scale, 'level 1,' scientists would report hints of a signature of life, such as a biologically relevant molecule. An example would be a future measurement of some molecule on Mars potentially related to life. Moving up to 'level 2,' scientists would ensure that the detection was not influenced by the instruments having been contaminated on Earth. At 'level 3' they would show how this biological signal is found in an analog environment, such as an ancient lakebed on Earth similar to the Perseverance rover’s landing site, Jezero Crater. "

At the links here or here we read that level 4 is "all known non-biological sources of signal found to be implausible in that environment," and that level 5 is "additional, independent signal from biology discovered."  Level 6 is "future observations that rule out alternative hypotheses proposed after original announcement." Level 7 is "independent, follow-up observations of predicted biological behaviour in the environment." 

It is nice that someone has thought out such a "progressive scale" that should be followed before the discovery of extraterrestrial life is announced. You can summarize the underlying thinking rather like this: "Don't say you can walk until you have shown you can crawl; don't say you can run until you have shown you can walk; and don't say you can make long flying leaps until you've shown you can run."  Or to express the same idea another way, "Don't say you can write words until you've shown you can write characters (letters); don't say you can write sentences until you've shown you can write words; don't say you can write paragraphs until you've shown you can write sentences; don't say you can write essays, articles or short stories until you've shown you can write paragraphs; and don't say you can write books until you've shown you can write essays, articles or short stories." 

It is a shame that such an approach was never used in regard to earthly biology. In regard to their claims about explaining the wonders of earthly biology, our biology professors were very much like someone claiming he can make long flying leaps before he has demonstrated he can crawl, walk or run; and our biology professors were very much like someone claiming he could write books before he had ever shown he could write paragraphs or sentences or single words. 

Let us imagine a Confidence of Human Origins Explanation scale rather similar to the Confidence of Life Detection scale proposed by the NASA scientists. The scale would be a progressive series of levels that must be reached before any credible announcement can be made of an explanation for a natural origin for the human race. We can imagine different levels in such a scale:

Level 1	Good understanding of the physical structure, complexity and organization of the low-level microscopic building blocks that make up an organism, including protein molecules and cells.
Level 2	Good understanding of what causes any reproduction occurring in such low-level microscopic building blocks.
Level 3	Good understanding of the origin of life from non-life, with experiments verifying such an understanding.
Level 4	Good understanding of how a speck-sized human egg is able to progress to become the vastly more organized reality of a full-sized human organism.
Level 5	Observations of visible very complex novel biological innovations appearing, possibly over some long length of time.
Level 6	Good understanding of how such visible very complex biological innovations occurred because of some natural process.
Level 7	Good understanding of the origin of the human mind including an understanding of how memory storage and instantaneous memory retrieval occurs, how consciousness arises, and how humans are able to think, speak and write.
Level 8	Understanding of the origin of human language and writing.
Level 9	Publication of a credible theory of the natural origin of the human species.

The need to follow such a scale is rather obvious.  Specifically:

• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species if you can't first explain how humans get their mental characteristics and mental abilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species if you haven't first solved the million-times-simpler question of how a microscopic cell could have first originated. If you can't do experiments demonstrating the origin of life from non-life, then you should very much doubt any natural explanation of the origin of humans.    
•  It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species if you don't understand the microscopic parts that make up a human body. 
•  It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species if you merely understand how women get pregnant, and don't know how a speck-sized egg is able to progress to become a full human body; for if you don't know that, then you don't even understand the origin of the full-sized body of any adult human being. 
• It makes no sense to claim such an understanding of how a human being is able to reproduce if you don't even understand how some microscopic cell is able to reproduce. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species if you don't know how a human mind is able to arise; for if you don't know that, then you don't even understand the origin of any adult human being.
• If you cannot credibly explain how humans got one of their most fundamental traits (the use of language), then you should doubt you have any credible theory of natural human origins. 
• If there have been no human observations of visible very complex novel biological innovations naturally appearing, then you cannot claim to have an empirically well-founded theory of how novel species such as humans could have naturally originated. 

Did scientists follow any kind of cautious multi-step scale like the one above before declaring that they had discovered the origin of humans? No, they did not.  After Charles Darwin published his "armchair reasoning" works on the origin of species and the origin of man, our scientists triumphantly declared that the origin of species and the origin of man had been explained.  But none of the foundation had been laid for such a claim.  None of the prerequisites had been met. Specifically:

• Darwin had no understanding of the physical structure, complexity and organization of the low-level microscopic building blocks that make up an organism, including protein molecules and cells.
• Darwin had no understanding of how a eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce, something that is still not understood today. 
• Darwin had no understanding of the origin of the first living thing, something that is still not understood today, and cannot be explained by evolution (which requires the existence of life). 
• Darwin had no understanding of how a speck-sized human egg is able to progress to become the incredibly organized reality of a full-sized human organism, something that is still not understood today, because the claim that bodies arise from DNA blueprints is a fiction with no basis in fact, DNA being a molecule that does not at all specify the structure of cells or anatomy. 
• Darwin knew nothing of any observations of visible very complex novel biological innovations naturally appearing, something that humans have never observed. The variations that arise during things like dog breeding are not very complex novel biological innovations, and do not arise naturally but through artificial human action. 
• Darwin had no understanding of the origin of the human mind including an understanding of how memory storage and retrieval occurs, how consciousness arises, and how humans are able to think, speak and write -- all things that are still not understood today.
• Darwin had no understanding of the origin of human language and writing, things that are still not understood today.

In the late nineteenth century biologists followed nothing like formal rules of evidence or a "progressive multi-level scale" before declaring that Darwin had figured out the origin of species and the origin of man.  Our biologists simply hastily enthroned Darwin as their new Isaac Newton. They read Darwin's evidence-scanty "armchair reasoning" and said, "Good enough!" 

What would be the modern-day equivalent of such a thing? It would go rather like this: before anyone had discovered any convincing sign of any type of extraterrestrial life, scientists all over the world would rather suddenly start hailing the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life, merely because some man named Jenkins had written books giving armchair reasoning arguing that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists in the center of the galaxy.  Scientists would start lavishly praising the "brilliant insight" of Jenkins, and start hailing him as the new Isaac Newton.

Why We Should Be Skeptical If NASA Ever Announces ET Life Was Found

 Let us imagine a future event that would attract great worldwide attention. First, we can imagine that rumors start to spread around the Internet that NASA is about to anounce the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Then NASA announces a press conference in which it will release momentous news.  We might see newspaper headlines like the ones below:

We can imagine CNN and Fox News covering the press conference, in which some NASA officials or NASA scientists solemnly proclaim that life has been discovered somewhere in space.  If that happens, should we believe the announcement? 

We probably should not, because NASA has a bad record when speaking on the topic of extraterrestrial life and the origin of life. Let's look at some of its misstatements on such topics. 

On August 7, 1996 NASA released a press announcement with the headline "METEORITE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE ON EARLY MARS." The press release tried to convince us that some NASA scientists had found evidence of life on Mars by studying some meteorite. After a White House photo opportunity with President Bill Clinton, this story was carried all over the world. But now such evidence is not generally regarded as good evidence for life on Mars. It seems that NASA got overexcited about some marginal hard-to-interpret indications in a rock. 

There have been other similar cases in which NASA announcements on extraterrestrial life or the origin of life were not credible.  One such case was when NASA announced in 2019 "NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor."  The experimental study (discussed here) did no such thing.  The study merely produced alanine, one of the simplest amino acids. Claiming that you reproduced the origin of life when you merely produced alanine is as brazen a falsehood as claiming that you produced a novel when you merely produced some paper.  The study did not even discuss an experiment realistically simulating any early Earth conditions. The alanine was produced in closed glass vials. 

In 2018 the Daily Express had a headline, “NASA announcement shock: space agency closing in on finding alien life.” The paper quotes the agency as saying, “As we continue checking off items on the habitability list, we'll draw closer and closer to finding a world bearing recognizable signs of life.”  The headline and the statement were both false. NASA was not closing in on finding extraterrestrial life, and was not getting “closer and closer” to finding a world with extraterrestrial life.  An example of the reality is a recent paper reporting a search of 10 billion stars for evidence of radio signals, a search that found nothing. 

A recent NASA press announcement states, "Massive Stars Are Factories for Ingredients to Life."  The headline and story are misleading in two respects. The use of the term "factories" implies that something complex is being created.  That is not correct, because the report merely refers to very simple things: water (H₂0), ammonia (NH₃), methane (CH₄), and acetylene (C₂H₂).  All of these have chemical formulas much simpler than the amino acids that are the simplest things that could be called building blocks of life.  And neither ammonia nor methane nor acetylene is actually an ingredient of life, in the sense of being any kind of building block of life. 

It seems that NASA has a poor record of speaking accurately about matters relating to the origin of life or extraterrestrial life. So why should we have much confidence if it were to claim that extraterrestrial life had been found? 

In today's science news, there is a BBC article which wonders whether microbes could have traveled recently from Earth to Mars, riding on NASA spacecraft that may have been imperfectly sterilized. The article states the following: "Although Nasa and its engineers in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have precise and thorough protocols to ensure their spacecraft are free from any organisms that might inadvertently hitchhike on a space mission, two recent studies highlight how some organisms might have survived the cleaning process." So if NASA ever announces life was found on Mars, it could merely be an earthly microbe that was found.  Any such announcement would be an enormous boost to the prestige of NASA, possibly causing an increase in its funding. So we may wonder whether NASA has a motivation for sterilizing spacecraft to Mars in a somewhat less-than-foolproof manner. 

One type of announcement that could be made would be one claiming to have found radio signals from extraterrestrials. Any such announcement should be treated with skepticism. For one thing, there is a large possibility that some artificial radio transmission from Earth or from a satellite might be mistaken for a signal from extraterrestrials, a radio transmission that was never intended to be mistaken for a signal from extraterrestrials. 

For another thing, there is the fact that a radio signal resembling a signal from extraterrestrials can very easily be faked. One way to do that would be to have a satellite or space probe transmit a radio signal that was designed to look like an extraterrestrial radio signal. The possibility of such mischief by a foreign nation can hardly be dismissed in light of claims of foreign interference in the United States elections. 

Given such claims, there would always be the possibility that a radio signal that we thought was coming from another planet was actually coming from somewhere else in our solar system, perhaps from one of the satellites or probes of China or Russia or some other nation. There could be any number of reasons why a nation might resort to such a trick. One reason is that such a ruse might be used to create a distraction diverting public attention from some scandal or suspicions involving that nation, such as supicions of a pandemic arising from a lab leak coming from that nation. Or if a nation were planning on launching a surprise attack or doing a military buildup, it might create illusory “radio messages from extraterrestrials” to get the world's attention focused on such a matter, and away from threatening troop movements or weapons deployments the nation was starting to make.

Another reason for doubting the source of a message claimed as coming from extraterrestrials is that such a message might crop up as a result of computer hacking. The radio telescopes scanning for extraterrestrial signals are linked up to computers and software needed to analyze the signals. Such computers and software might be subject to computer hacking. Hackers might download a fake signal fooling astronomers into thinking they had received a message from the stars. If this sounds too far-fetched, consider all the high-profile large-scale hacks that have gone on in recent years, such as North Korea supposedly breaking into the computer systems of a major corporation, and the very recent major ransomware hack of Colonial Pipeline, a very large US energy distribution system.  Anyone reading the list of computer hacks given here (typically involving hundreds of millions of customers) should not doubt the possibility that hackers could hack into the computer networks of a small number of scientists searching for radio signals from space. 

A recent news headline

There are any number of reasons why hackers might want to create such a deception.  One would be the sheer fun of creating the ultimate prank.  There might also be more serious reasons. An announced discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might cause various movements in the prices of particular stocks. For example, a manufacturer of radio telescopes or a defense contractor might find their stock prices rising much higher after such an announcement.  So some hacking group might invest in futures or options on some corporation expected to have its stock price rise after an announcement claiming signals had been found from extraterrestrials.  Then such a group might cause some SETI systems hack creating fake data leading scientists to make such an announcement. The result might be a financial windfall for the hacking group, if it had invested in futures or options of the corporations with prices expected to rise after such an announcement.