We Have No Robust Evidence of Nucleobases on an Asteroid

 In the science news on the day I am writing this post, we have yet another dubious science-flavored headline. It is a press release talking about an unmanned spacecraft that retrieved a soil sample from an asteroid. We have a headline of "Asteroid Reveals the 5 Key Genetic Ingredients For Life on Earth."  Where to begin on how misleading this claim is? 

(1) Unlike soup, which is made from "ingredients" that can be poured into a soup pot, life cannot arise from non-life by a mere accumulation of the right ingredients. For life to arise from non-life, you need an enormously high level of organization. 

(2) You could never be justified in using the term "genetic ingredients" unless you were talking about a gene, which is a unit of functional information that tells which amino acids make up a particular type of functional protein molecule. No one ever discovered any protein molecule on an asteroid, nor has anyone discovered any gene on an asteroid. 

(3) Just as functional paragraphs are made up of hundreds of well-arranged characters, genes are made up of hundreds or thousands of well-arranged chemical units called nucleobases.  No one has even produced a trustworthy account of nucleobases discovered on an asteroid, in a reliable detection we can trust. All that happened is that some scientists claimed to have discovered some nucleobases in the tiniest trace amounts in a soil sample retrieved from an asteroid, without ever actually having adequate warrant for such a claim. 

The press release follows the rule that all press releases of this type follow: the rule that no mention is ever made of how much of the supposedly discovered chemical was discovered. It almost invariably  turns out that the chemical reportedly found has reportedly been found at some negligible trace amount such as 1 part per billion. The people who write press releases of this type are like people who tell you that money can be found by sifting through the sand at a beach, while failing to tell you that what they mean is maybe 1 penny every 100 meters of sand.  

A look at the scientific paper being promoted by the press release gives us the expected reports of only negligible trace amounts. Figure 3 shows us that the reported total levels of nucleobases is less than 3000 picomoles per gram, which is the same as 3 nanomoles per gram. A picomole is a trillionth of a mole. A gram of ordinary soil has about .2 moles per gram. So if you are analyzing a gram of soil from an asteroid, and find something at a level of less than 3 nanomoles per gram, you are finding an abundance level of roughly 1 part in 100 million. I get that number by typing into Google "3 nanomoles per gram divided by .2 moles per gram," which then gives me an answer of roughly 1 part in 100 million. 

But the fact that the paper reports reports such an abundance level does not mean we should accept that claim uncritically. In investigations such as this, there is the all-important issue of terrestrial contamination. Nucleobases are all over Earth, as nucleobases are in all life, and the planet is teeming with life. In any space mission going from Earth to an asteroid and then returning a soil sample from an asteroid, there would be chances of earthly contamination everywhere. Nucleobases or amino acids might be transmitted from Earth to the asteroid, if there was not a perfect removal of all nucleobases from the spacecraft landing on the asteroid. Or when the soil sample was retrieved and brought back to Earth, nucleobases or amino acids on Earth might get into the soil sample, compromising the analysis. The issue is explained in the infographic below. 

Infographic by Google Gemini

For any scientific paper to credibly report very tiny amounts of nucleobases supposedly found in samples retrieved from an asteroid, there would need to be a thorough discussion of the issue of earthly contamination -- or else the paper should not be taken very seriously.  How much discussion of contamination is there in the the scientific paper being promoted in the press release discussed above?  There is none. The paper does not even use the word "contamination." 

We simply have no reliable evidence here that any nucleobases were discovered on an asteroid. The reported extremely tiny levels of nucleobases (about 1 part in 100 million) are best explained under the idea of earthly contamination. There is no easy way to remove all traces of nucleobases from a spacecraft sent to an asteroid, and no easy way to make sure that earthly nucleobases are kept out of some lab that is analyzing such samples. You can make sure that a spacecraft sent to an asteroid is sterile, by using sterilization techniques that kill all life forms. But nucleobases are not removed by mere sterilization. 

A December 2025 LiveScience article tells us this:

 "Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes....persist in these punishing environments."

If entire microbes can exist in such cleanrooms used to prepare spacecraft for biology-related missions and used to analyze samples returned by such spacecraft, how much more likely it is that mere nucleobases would exist in such cleanrooms? Nucleobases are very many times smaller than microbes. It is many times harder to remove all nucleobases from a cleanroom and a spacecraft than to remove all microbes. Nucleobases are everywhere on Earth, and cannot be killed conveniently by simple sterilization methods that kill microbes.  

We simply cannot have any high confidence that the reported detections of tiniest trace amounts of nucleobases in a soil  sample from an asteroid tells us anything about the existence of nucleobases on such an asteroid.  Earthly contamination is the most plausible explanation of these results. Even if such nucleobases existed on an asteroid in such tiniest trace amounts, it would have little significance in explaining life's origin. There would be nothing capable of extracting chemicals in such tiniest trace amounts and concentrating them and usefully arranging them to help make a living thing.  Similarly, the ground of a forest may have here and there a twig or group of twigs that make the characters "I" or "H" or "T." But we know of nothing that could cause characters so rarely appearing on a forest floor to become concentrated and intelligibly arranged to spell out a paragraph of useful text. 

A scientific paper tells us this:

"Mycoplasmas are the simplest cells capable of independent growth in laboratory media...One of those three species, Mycoplasma genitalium, has the smallest genome at 580,076 [nucleobases] (Fraser et al. 1995). It has long been referred to as a minimal or near-minimal cell and used as a surrogate for a minimal cell in many studies. The genes that remain in modern mycoplasmas likely consist of only the minimum number of genes needed for life in their natural habitat."

Don't think for a moment that you can get such a cell by merely accumulating or concentrating about half a million nucleobases of any type. Instead, the nucleobases must all be specially arranged to make the roughly 470 genes in such a cell, each of which is its own separate complex invention, typically consisting of hundreds of well-arranged parts.  The total required amount of very well-arranged functional information is very roughly the same as that required to make a 100-page book. 

But today's science journalists never seem to tell us such things, and instead stupidly speak rather as if getting life from non-life is as easy as dumping the right soup ingredients into a soup pot, failing to understand the organization requirements, kind of like the guy below. 

Bennu Building Block Bunk Balloons Badly

 Boy, are they ever talking about something they say was found in the asteroid Bennu. But it's mainly more "science slop" baloney. 

An example is the recent Fake News headline in the often-erring New York Post, a paper I am not very proud to have as an example of my local New York City newspapers. It is the doubly untrue headline "Asteroid hurtling toward Earth found to be teeming with building blocks of life: researchers." The title refers to the asteroid Bennu, which is not "hurtling towards Earth." And the chemicals referred to (which probably do not even exist on Bennu) are chemicals claimed to have been detected in only the tiniest trace amounts, such as 1 part in a billion -- a level that can never truthfully be described as "teeming." 

What happened was that a spacecraft (OSIRIS-REx) retrieved a small sample of soil from the asteroid Bennu, and the sample was brought back to Earth. Scientists analyzing the sample reported the tiniest trace amounts of some amino acids and some of the nucleobases used in RNA, along with some sugars. However, the reported amounts were all so small we can have no confidence in the reported results. In all likelihood, they are simply due to earthly contamination, which could have occurred at any of many different stages of the scooping up/earthly retrieval/earthly analysis process.  

The December 2025 paper that is the inspiration for such clickbait is one co-authored by Daniel P. Glavin, and entitled "Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu." We read a claim of a detection of sugars, but the abundance levels are negligible. The paper states this:

"The abundances of ribose, lyxose, arabinose and xylose were 0.097 ± 0.014, 0.018 ± 0.007, 0.11 ± 0.03 and 0.079 ± 0.033 nmol g−1, respectively (Table 1). Glucose had the highest concentration of the sugars at 0.35 ± 0.05 nmol g−1, whereas galactose was 0.014 ± 0.004 nmol g−1 (Table 1)."

The phrase "nmol g" means nanomole per gram. The reported abundance are less than 1 nanomole per gram, which is roughly something like 1 part per billion. When a claim is made to have detected something at a level so small, we can have no confidence that the result actually came from space, as opposed to resulting from earthly contamination.

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 from trace amounts from Earth that were left on the spacecraft when it reached the asteroid Bennu.

The relevant threshold here is 180 nanograms per square centimeter. Anything greater than such an amount might be evidence of amino acids or sugars picked up from the asteroid Bennu. Anything less than that we can have no confidence in, and should regard as purely the result of earthly contamination.  None of the "building blocks of life" reportedly detected from the asteroid Bennu exceeds this threshold. They are all much less than the threshold. 

So we can have no reasonable confidence in any of these reports of detecting amino acids or nucleobases or sugars from material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu. No reliable evidence has been presented that anything relevant to life was discovered on the asteroid Bennu. 

The "Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu" paper confesses, "The abundances of the biologically important sugars in the Bennu sample (glucose, arabinose, ribose and xylose) might nevertheless suggest the possibility of contamination." The valine row in Extended Data Table 4 of the paper reporting tiniest trace amounts of amino acids in Bennu samples suggests that earthly contamination may have occurred. There is a total "d/l" ratio of .5, which is not the 1.0 ratio we would expect if there was a sample without any earthly contamination. 

What almost always happens in such press reports is that writers pay zero attention to the negligible levels of the chemicals found, and the writers pay zero attention to the all-important issue of contamination, explained in the infographic above. 

The New York Post article quotes the sometimes-misspeaking astronomer Avi Loeb as claiming, "The finding that the asteroid Bennu contains most amino acids, the building blocks of life-as-we-know-it suggests that these building blocks are common in the Universe."  No, supposedly finding something in only the tiniest trace amounts of a few parts per billion does not suggest that something is common.  And in this case no reliable evidence has been gathered that anything relevant to life was discovered in space, because of the very high chance of earthly contamination. And amino acids are not actually the "building blocks of life."  The building components of one-celled life are protein molecules, which are very special arrangements of amino acids, arrangements fantastically unlikely to arise by chance. Components requiring so many specially arranged parts should never be referring to as "building blocks," as if they were simple. 

Astronomers have been making these kind of misstatements for 50 years. Astronomer Carl Sagan told us the same baloney, when he falsely claimed this: "The carbon-rich complex molecules that are essential for the kind of life we know about, are fantastically abundant. They litter the universe."  There are no reports of detecting amino acids, sugars or nucleobases in space, in anything more than the tiniest trace amounts; and such reports are typically unreliable, involving very large uncertainties that make them weak from an evidence standpoint. 

Postscript: A December 2025 LiveScience article tells us this:

 "Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes....persist in these punishing environments."

If entire microbes can exist in such cleanrooms used to prepare spacecraft for biology-related missions and used to analyze samples returned by such spacecraft, how much more likely it is that amino acids would exist in such cleanrooms? Amino acids are very many times smaller than microbes. It is many times harder to remove all amino acids from a cleanroom than to remove all microbes. Amino acids are everywhere on Earth, and cannot be killed conveniently by simple sterilization methods that kill microbes.  

NASA's Asteroid-Stuff Retrieval Mission: The Spilling Boondoggle

The OSIRIS-REx mission is a billion-dollar NASA mission designed to retrieve some matter from an asteroid, and return it to Earth.  It is rather hard for me to imagine a less worthy way to spend a billion dollars. Asteroids are lifeless dry rocks in space that contain nothing very interesting.  We already have a pretty good idea of what makes up an asteroid. Many meteorites have hit the Earth, and scientists who have analyzed their composition have a basis for inferring the element composition of asteroids.  A science site tells us that most meteorites "are fragments of asteroids."

Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

Nobody is interested in the exact composition of asteroids other than a very tiny tribe of scientists such as planetary geologists.  If we get back a little asteroid material from the mission, the results will be a complete yawn to 99.9% of the people who read the results in their science news feeds.  It will be some very boring result such as "80% iron and 20% a combination of nickel, iridium, palladium, and  magnesium." 

Will we be able to know from such a retrieval what is the average element composition of asteroids? We certainly will not. This is because the mission is only getting material from one little part of one asteroid.  The material retrieved could easily be not  representative of the average element composition in the asteroid that the craft landed on, and could easily not be representative of the average element composition in asteroids in general. You can no more tell  the element composition of asteroids by getting a sample from one little spot of one asteroid than you can tell how North Carolina will vote in the next election by randomly picking a single house in North Carolina and asking the owner how he will vote. 

The mission successfully landed on a near-Earth asteroid, and is coming back to Earth with the sample it retrieved.  But now we hear that the sample is spilling into space. A news report tells us that the mission was designed to retrieve 60 grams of material, but the spacecraft is "continually losing between 5 to 10 grams of material."  Will there be any of the sample left by the time the spacecraft returns to Earth?  Only time will tell. 

Even if the spacecraft does return with some asteroid material, it will return with an essentially worthless payload. Why did we spend a billion dollars on such a project of so little interest to the public, when so many scientific projects of high interest to the public are not being undertaken?

I can give two reasons. The first is that NASA is now a privileged fiefdom that believes it is entitled to billions of dollars of annual funding, even for projects not very useful or interesting.  Submitting exorbitant budget requests each year, NASA is now like some billionaire's daughter who thinks she is entitled to a weekly allowance of a million dollars. The second reason is that a thousand worthy scientific projects that are of high interest to the public are not being undertaken because scientists have taboos against doing various types of research, and seem to be afraid that there might occur observations defying their cherished dogmas.  For one tenth the cost of the boondoggle OSIRIS-REx project, you could do a hundred "bang-for-the-buck" scientific research projects relating to topics such as hypnotism, ESP, inexplicable healings, deathbed visions, near-death experiences, UFOs, fortean phenomena, apparition sightings, humans who seem to have inexplicable powers, and people with high cognitive abilities and highly damaged brains. Such projects would be of very high public interest. Previous investigations on these topics give strong reasons for thinking that very important and very interesting results will come from further investigations into these topics. But research into such topics is not federally funded largely because many of our scientists have effectively declared most such things as taboo areas unworthy of further inquiry. Maybe our scientists are afraid that investigations in such areas might lead people to think things that our scientists don't want them to think, such as the idea that people have souls, or that the dogmatic proclamations of professors can be cast into doubt by observations from people who are not professors.  

And so we spend a billion dollars retrieving a worthless, boring clump of dust and rock that only a tiny tribe of specialists are interested in, rather than using a tenth of that money to get results that have great relevance to who we are and the fundamental nature of life and mind, results that almost everyone would be interested in. 

The current NASA budget is about 22 billion dollars. Using 2020 equivalent dollars, we could calculate that over its history of more than 60 years, more than a trillion dollars has been allocated to NASA.  But if asked to name a single important thing that was ever discovered by NASA, the average person would be unable to think of anything. 

Here is a reasonable proposal:

(1) Reduce NASA's budget by 50%, which would prevent it from running boondoggle projects. 

(2) Use one-half of the savings to help reduce the ever-more-out-of-control US budget deficit, currently at 3 trillion dollars.

(3) Use the other half of the savings to fund a new government agency called the National Discovery Administration, which would have a mandate of producing important new discoveries, by funding many small research projects with a potentially high bang-for-the-buck, regardless of whether they had anything to do with outer space, and regardless of whether they violated the belief taboos of the professors. 

(4) Every five years evaluate how many important discoveries this new administration has made, and sharply decrease its budget if it has not made any important new discovery of general interest to the public. 

Postscript:  A tiny piece of asteroid material gathered from a Japanese has been analyzed by scientists. The result is completely boring. But you wouldn't know that from the very misleading headline in the Daily Mail: "Water and organic materials essential for life on Earth are found on the surface of an ASTEROID for the first time."  The actual details in a scientific paper with the give-you-the-wrong-idea title "Organic matter and water from asteroid Itokawa." In the paper we find that this water is merely about 100 parts per million (less than in the sand dunes of the Sahara desert), and that the organic matter is biologically irrelevant carbon stuff, not any of the amino acids or nucleotides that are the building blocks of the building blocks of life. We already knew from meteorites that asteroids have water in such very tiny trace amounts, and that asteroids have such biologically irrelevant carbon compounds.  All in all, this tends to confirm my opinion that sample retrieval missions from asteroids are pointless boondoggles. 

A 2024 paper tells us of the risk of contamination in any mission returning samples to Earth from space. When contamination occurs, earthly chemicals may be mistakenly identified as being part of a sample returned from space.  We read this:

"Currently there is an ongoing discussion on how best to obtain pristine samples from Solar System bodies where life may have started, either by future on-site missions or by sample-return missions. The decision will be based on time, cost, risk of contamination, and payload [87]. While on-site analysis will constrain the risk of contamination, the equipment onboard will be much more limited than what can be done in laboratories on Earth. On the other hand, sample-return missions will allow the use of a diversity of state-of-the-art equipment, but the risk of contamination of the samples is high, and curation facilities need to be in place. Even if contamination controls are implemented, minimal levels of terrestrial contamination will always occur, so that scientists must be able to distinguish between extraterrestrial organic matter and terrestrial organic matter [173]. "