Astronomers Keep Using Bad Reasoning About Extraterrestrial Life

 For many decades scientists have been asked about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  Again and again they have been posed these questions:

• Are we alone in the universe?
• Is there life on other planets?
• Is there intelligent life on other planets?
• Do extraterrestrial civilizations exist?

It seems that a large fraction of the time that scientists are asked these questions,  they reply by giving a fallacious argument. One such argument may be called the "many chances equals many successes" argument. The argument may be stated like this:

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be many planets on which life exists."

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be many planets with extraterrestrial civilizations."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so life must have arisen many times."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so there must be very many civilizations on other planets."

"There are a huge number of planets in our universe, so there must be many other extraterrestrial civilizations."

A very similar  argument may be called the "many chances equals some successes" argument. The argument may be stated like this:

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be some  planets on which life exists."

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be some planets with extraterrestrial civilizations."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so life must have arisen on some other planets."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so there must be some other civilizations on other planets."

"There are a huge number of planets in our universe, so there must be some other extraterrestrial civilizations."

We have an example of such a fallacious argument right at the beginning of the Netflix TV show "The Hunt for Planet B." We hear MIT scientist named Sara Seager say this:

"Well let me just say that in our own Milky Way galaxy there are a hundred billion stars and we now believe in our universe we have more than a hundred billion galaxies. So if you just do the math, the chance that there's a planet like earth out there with life on it is very high."

This is fallacious reasoning. You do not "do the math" by merely computing the total number of chances for an unlikely event to occur.  That's not "doing the math," but doing only half of the math.  Unless you have also estimated the chance of success on any one trial, you have only done half the math.  Seager follows her junk reasoning with the extremely false claim that "scientists never like to speculate." 

We also had an example of such a fallacious argument, stated by some British astronomer (Dame Maggie Aderin–Pocock). In the Daily Mail we read this:

"'In the whole of the universe there are approximately 200 billion galaxies,' Dame Maggie told the Daily Mail. 'And so although certain conditions were in place for life to start here on Earth, and this is the only example we have of life, I'm absolutely convinced that there's life out there, because with so many stars, so many planets, why would it just occur here?'

Such reasoning is completely fallacious. It is not at all true in general that "many chances equals many successes." It is also not at all true in general that "many chances equals some successes" or even that "many chances equals at least one success." If the probability of something happening is sufficiently low, then we should expect many chances to yield zero successes.  So "many chances" does not necessarily equal "many successes," and "many chances" does not necessarily equal "some successes" or even one success. For example:

• If everyone in the world threw a deck of cards into the air 1000 times, that would be almost 10 trillion chances for such flying cards to form into a house of cards. But we should not expect that in even one case would the flying deck of cards accidentally form into a triangular house of cards. 
• If a billion computers around the world each made a thousand attempts to write an intelligible book by randomly generating 100,000 characters, that would be a total of a trillion chances for an  intelligible book to be accidentally generated. But we should not expect that even one of these attempts would result in the creation of an intelligible book. And we should not even expect that even one of these attempts would result in the creation of a single well-spelled paragraph of more than 200 words. 
• If you buy a million tickets in a winner-take-all lottery in which the chance of winning is only 1 in 100 million, you should not expect that any one of those tickets will succeed in winning such a lottery. 

Below are some very general observations about probability:

• It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield many successes. 
• It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield some successes or even one success. 
• If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number less than 1, we should not expect that even one of the trials will produce a success.
• If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number greater than 1, we should  expect that at least one of the trials will produce a success.

Aderin–Pocock's language quoted above is very unwise. She has used a fallacious "many chances equals some successes" argument, and told us that because of this kind of reasoning she is not merely persuaded of a likelihood of extraterrestrial life but "absolutely convinced."

The origin of life from unguided processes is exactly the type of very-low-probability event that we should never expect to occur accidentally, even given a universe of 200 billion galaxies, each stacked with billions of planets. Below are some quotes from scientists and a doctor. 

• "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)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018. 
• "Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules."  John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 411. 
• "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." -- 3 scientists (link).
• "The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand." -- "The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth" by astronomer Paul Sutter. 
• "Even the simplest of these substances [proteins} represent extremely complex compounds, containing many thousands of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in absolutely definite patterns, which are specific for each separate substance. To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's 'Aeneid'  from scattered letter type." -- Chemist A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," pages 132-133.
• "The expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe." -- Scientist Tomonori Totani, "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe," a paper confessing we would not expect one natural origin of life (abiogenesis) even in the entire observable universe (link).
• "The advent of life from prebiotic origins remains a deep and possibly inexplicable scientific mystery." -- Scientist Stephen Mann (link). 
• "The origin of cells is shrouded in near-total mystery." -- A recent biology textbook written by scientists (link). 
• "We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." --  -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," page 250.
• "Thus, the chances of getting the right sequence of amino acids in a protein of 100 amino acids in length by random chance is 1 in 60¹⁰⁰ or 1 in 6.53 × 10¹⁷⁷. In the vernacular, that would be considerably less than 'slim to none.'  But that is just the odds of selecting the amino acids in the correct order; we still have some chemistry to do to combine them in the proper way via peptide bonds. Making proteins via undirected chemical reactions is beyond hard. Based upon these odds, it is impossible." -- Chemist Ed Peltzer, discussing the luck required to get only one of the many proteins needed for an accidental origin of life (link). 
• "Now people will argue that given the tremendous size of the ocean and the time involved, there is a tremendous resource for the many possibilities. I would argue that it does us no good to have the essential proteins scattered about the ocean and millions of years apart. We need all of them simultaneously and in the same spot. And that spot is tiny. A typical bacterial cell is very small. They range in size from 0.2 to 2.0 μm in diameter and 2 to 8 μm in length or 63 atto-L to 25 femto-L (63 × 10-18 L to 25 × 10-15 L) in volume.  So, time and chance are of no help here....Abiogenesis needs an external source of information that random undirected chemical reactions can never provide." -- Chemist Ed Peltzer,  (link).
• "Over the past few decades biologists have further unravelled the mind-blowing complexity of life at the molecular level and consequently laid bare its super-astronomical information content. Such a complexity is manifest for instance in the arrangements of amino acids in crucial enzymes, or nucleobases in DNA. The precise 'information' contained in enzymes— the arrangements of amino acids into folded chains—is transmitted by way of the coded ordering of the four nucleotide bases (A,T,G,C) in DNA. In a hypothetical RNA world, that some biologists think may have predated the DNA-protein world, RNA is posited to serve a dual role as both enzyme and transmitter of genetic information. If a few such ribozymes are regarded as precursors to all life, one could attempt to make an estimate of the probability of the assembly of a simple ribozyme composed of 300 bases. This probability turns out to be 1 in 4³⁰⁰, which is equivalent to 1 in 10¹⁸⁰, which can hardly be supposed to happen even once in the entire 13.9-billion-year history of the canonical Big Bang universe. And this is just for a single enzyme. In the simplest known bacterium M. genitalium with some 500 genes coding for enzymes the improbability escalates to a super-astronomical scale." -- 3 scientists (link).  
• "There is absolutely no evidence that life began on Earth. The problems with an Earth-centered abiogenesis can be summed up as follows: A) Complex life was present on Earth almost from the beginning. B) ...There was not enough time to create a complex self-replicating organism. C) DNA and complex organic molecules would have been destroyed by the environment of the early Earth. D) All the essential ingredients for creating life were missing on the new Earth. E) There is no evidence that life has been or can be produced from non-life on this planet." -- 2 scientists (link). 
• "The mathematical likelihood of finding RNA elsewhere in the universe is basically zero,” -- Lee Cronin, an expert in prebiotic chemistry (link). 

Below is a screen shot from a page showing the curriculum requirements to get a Master's Degree in astronomy at the University of California at San Diego. There is no course in probability mathematics. There is no course in biology. There is no course in chemistry. So why would anyone think that an astronomer is qualified to competently estimate the likelihood of life arising by unguided processes on other planets, by accidental chemical events?

It is possible that there is life on many other planets, but only if some purposeful agency is involved, some transcendent causal factor that overcomes the otherwise insurmountable odds of the accidental origin of life. 

The latest example of zany talk by astrobiologists is discussed in a recent post by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb promoting a nutty-sounding proposal for looking for signs of extraterrestrial life:

"A detailed preprint, posted recently here, suggests a new path in the search for technological signatures of extraterrestrial civilizations. The idea is to analyze a cubic meter of lunar regolith and look for sub-micron dust particles that might be relics from long gone technological structures of past civilizations in the Milky-Way galaxy. Such particles may survive over billions of years in their journey through interstellar space and eventually land on the lunar surface."

Science at its wackiest

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. 

It is quite possible that the universe has very many other forms of intelligent life, but the chance of that seems very slim if unguided material processes are all that's going on. 

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. 

NASA's Diminished Credibility on the Topic of Extraterrestrial Life

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? 

Postscript: Just after this post was published, I read a headline saying this:

"NASA to spend $20 billion to build a base on the moon

The agency is canceling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and ​will instead use its components to construct the ‌base, NASA chief Jared Isaacman said."

We get rather an impression of minds that keep switching their plans. Replacing a space station orbiting the moon with a base on the surface of the moon is a case of replacing one boondoggle with another. I also read recently of a NASA plan to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to land unmanned helicopters on Mars, supposedly for the sake of scouting around for a good landing site for a manned mission. It's another plan that makes me ask: why the hell are they doing that? The surface of Mars has already been thoroughly mapped, and we already know of quite a few places that would make good landing sites for a manned mission.  

Problems With the Vickers Paper Polling Scientists About Extraterrestrial Life

 In 2025 there appeared the paper "Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life" by Vickers et. al. The paper had a survey on the topic of whether scientists believe in extraterrestrial life. Below are the results, from questions in which scientists were asked whether they think that on other planets there is life, complex life, or intelligent life. 

There are several problems with the paper and its survey, which I will now discuss.

Problem #1: A Voluntary Response Email Survey 

The survey worked this way: scientists were sent emails asking them to reply to the survey, and 44% of the scientists replied by answering the survey.  But it is known that surveys of this type tend to be unreliable measurements of opinion, particularly when they are about some controversial topic. The problem is that there may be a much higher tendency for people who believe in some controversial theory to respond to a survey that asks only about their belief in that theory, rather than ignore such a survey. 

For example, imagine you send a survey to scientists that is only on the topic of controversial Theory X, a theory which most scientists scorn or have no knowledge of. It could be that 80% of the scientists getting this email decide to ignore it, thinking to themselves something like this: "Theory X? To hell with that." But it might be very different for some small minority of scientists who believe in Theory X. After getting the email, they may recognize the survey as an opportunity to improve the status of Theory X in the scientific community; and they may therefore be much more likely to respond. 

I remember a time more than 40 years ago when I worked two full-time jobs for a period of months. My second full-time job was a temporary job working for the US Census Bureau in Boston. The US government wanted to find out what percentage of the population used the fishing and wildlife services supported by the US government.  Workers like me were given stacks of survey forms, each of which had the name of a randomly selected US citizen. My job was to call up such people, and insist that they answer the survey's questions over the phone, questions asking about how often they used the government-supported fishing and wildlife facilities. I would have to keep calling back later if someone claimed to be too busy to answer when I called.  I would very frequently get responses like this from annoyed people:

"Why are you bothering to ask me about such things? I have never gone fishing in my life, nor have I ever gone hunting. So the government shouldn't be asking me about such things!"

I had to explain to such people the concept of a survey of random people: that the only scientifically valid way to find out what percentage of people used the government's fishing and wildlife facilities was to ask randomly selected people about this topic, to keep asking until all of them answered the questions, and to be just as interested in getting "no" answers as "yes" answers.  The US Census Bureau knew how to do a scientifically valid survey. The people at that bureau knew that it never would have been valid to just advertise some survey about fishing and wildlife, and to record what percentage of people choosing to do the survey said that they used fishing and wildlife facilities.  If you did the survey that way, it might have been that most of the participants would have been those who loved to do fishing and hunting.  The survey might then have given very misleading results perhaps suggesting that most people in the US use the government's fishing and wildlife facilities, when in fact only a small minority of the population used such facilities.  

Too bad Vickers et. al. did not seem to have the same knowledge of the proper way to determine what percentages of scientists think a particular thing. You cannot find out what percentage of a scientist community believes in a theory by sending them a voluntary survey on only that theory, one that will tend to get more replies from those who believe in that theory.  For example, if you send physicists a survey about their belief in the controversial theory called string theory, there will tend to be a much higher response rate from people believing in string theory than those not believing in it. 

One way to reduce the problem mentioned above is to do a voluntary email survey asking about many different things, such as a survey asking 50 diverse questions. With such a survey there will not tend to be an effect in which believers in some controversial theory are much more likely to respond. 

Problem #2: A Slanting in the Questions

Professional pollsters know that the way that a survey question is asked can have a very great influence on what kind of response people give. For example, here are two questions about gun control you could ask people in the USA:

Question 1: Do you think people should give up their right to bear arms given them by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution?

Question 2: Do you support gun control to reduce all these terrible mass shootings that keep happening?

Question 1 is a question about gun control, one slanted to produce a "no" answer. Question 2 is also a question about gun control, but it is  slanted to produce a "yes" answer.

Now, what are the questions in the Vickers survey? The paper lists these survey questions:

(Statement S1 – ‘Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

(Statement S2 – ‘Complex Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial organisms significantly larger and more complex than bacteria exist somewhere in the universe.

(Statement S3 – ‘Intelligent Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial organisms with advanced cognitive abilities comparable to or superior to those of humans exist somewhere in the universe."

These set of questions are a terrible way to survey people about extraterrestrial life. The questions have a very strong bias, because they doubly-suggest the idea that the least complex extraterrestrial life  would be simple. Humans know of no type of life that is simple. Even one-celled bacteria are very complex organisms that require hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own complex invention requiring a very special sequence of hundreds of very specially arranged amino acids. 

The first way in which the survey questions above slants things and introduces bias is by using the phrase "of at least a basic kind" in the line referring to Statement S1. The second way in which the survey questions above slants things and introduces bias is by using the phrase "complex life" in referring to Statement S2. This indirectly suggests that what is being talked about in Statement S1 is life that is not complex. But all known life is very complex. So we have a severely slanted set of questions in which subjects are being asked to whether they agree that life "of at least a basic kind" exist, with the very misleading insinuation that such life could exist without being complex. Using such phraseology is introducing severe bias, as if the scientists running the survey were trying to gin up a response as high as possible to the first question. 

Then there is the fact that the survey suggests a particular opinion rather than asking a neutral question. Instead of being asked neutral questions asking things like "is it likely or not likely that..." we have questions stating a particular belief and asking whether respondents agree. It is well-known by pollsters that questions asked that way tend to produce a higher agreement with the stated belief.  For example, if you have a survey stating "marijuana use is safe" and asking whether people agree with that statement, you will get a higher level of agreement than if you ask "do you agree or disagree that marijuana use is safe?"

What would an objective, well-designed survey have looked like? It might have neutral questions like this:

Question 1: What do you think about the chances that there is  microscopic life on some other planet? 

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Question 2: What do you think about the chances that there is  visible multicellular life on some other planet, such as organisms with organs? 

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Question 3: What do you think about the chances that there is  intelligent life on some other planet, life as intelligent as humans or more intelligent?

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Problem #3: No secret ballot

As a general rule, we should pay little attention to any survey in which scientists are asked about whether they believe in something that allegedly most scientists believe in, whenever the survey is not a secret ballot poll. The reason is that when a poll is not a secret ballot survey, scientists may answer in some way that they think they are supposed to answer, fearing that they may get in trouble if they do not go along with the majority. 

We have no evidence that the survey in the paper "Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life" is a secret ballot survey. In this case the lack of a secret ballot is relatively minor, because there did not exist a common idea that scientists were expected to think one thing or another about whether extraterrestrial life exists. 

Problem #4: Describing the results with the word "consensus"

In my post "So Much Misleading Talk Occurs in Claims of a Scientific Consensus," I discuss the word games that scientists play when they use the notoriously slippery, problematic and ambiguous word "consensus."  The problem is that "consensus" is a word with a double meaning. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us two definitions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first definition is "general agreement; unanimity." The second definition is "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." The first definition specifies 100%, and the second definition merely means 51% or more. 

Scientists very frequently exploit this ambiguity in a misleading way, just as they very frequently exploit ambiguity in the word "evolution" (another term with different meanings). Scientists may brag about a "consensus" on some topic when there is no evidence that even 90% of scientists agree on the topic.  They thereby are trying to create the impression in many people's minds that scientists agree on some topic, when no such agreement exists. 

We have an example of this in the paper I am discussing. It ends up bragging of "a significant consensus that extraterrestrial life likely does exist," even though its poll shows a fair fraction of the responding astrobiologists failing to declare that they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the idea that extraterrestrial life exists, and about a third of the responding astrobiologists failing to declare that they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the idea that "complex" extraterrestrial life exists. Given the ambiguity in the word "consensus," and that half of the public interprets that word to mean "unanimity of opinion," such a belief level should not be described as a consensus; it should merely be described as a majority opinion. In fact, because of problems discussed above, we do not even have here any very strong evidence that most astrobiologists or biologists agree that extraterrestrial life probably exists.  A well-designed set of neutrally-worded poll questions without the question bias documented above might well have shown fewer than half of the respondents agreeing that visible  extraterrestrial life exists. According to the poll, the number of astrobiologists agreeing that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists was 58%. That level of belief should never be described as a consensus, but a mere majority opinion. 

A poll like this would not mean much

"Crying Wolf" Astrobiologists Are Squandering Their Credibility

Charles Darwin never had any decent explanation for any of the more impressive organization marvels of biology. The claim that he had such an explanation is a socially constructed triumphal legend. I call it the Lamest Legend, because of the cobweb weight of Darwin's appeals to insanely lucky luck, and also because most of the more hard-to-explain wonders of biology (such as gigantic amounts of fine-tuning and component interdependence and information-rich organization in cells and biochemistry) are things Darwin knew nothing about. So telling the legend that Darwin explained the wonders of biology is like telling the legend that the ancient philosopher Plato explained the electronic wonders of television sets. 

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.