The Mars Mission: A Science Fiction Story

For years after the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA kept lobbying for a manned mission to Mars. It was sold as an exciting mission to discover life on another world.  This sales pitch was very dubious, because the unmanned spacecraft landed on Mars had never given good reason for much hope about finding life on Mars. Two experiments on the 1976 Viking mission to Mars had seemed to give enouraging results, but the same lander had found no organic molecules, which was profoundly discouraging for all hopes of finding life. Other unmanned missions to Mars had failed to find any of the real building blocks of life. None of the twenty amino acids used by living things had been found on Mars, and none of the nucleotides used by DNA or RNA had been found on Mars. 

But passionate pitchmen kept saying that on Mars there had been found what they called "ingredients of life" or "building blocks of life."  They were referring to biologically irrelevant carbon molecules that were not at all "building blocks of life," and were no more "ingredients of life" than the sand particles on a beach are "ingredients of computers."  And even if there were "building blocks of life" on Mars, this would no more make life likely than it would be likely for a long useful technical manual to arise from someone throwing Scrabble squares against a wall. But since congressional representatives and senators were woefully bad at understanding chemistry, they were easy marks for a "let's send men to find life on Mars" sales pitch based on misleading claims that "ingredients of life" or "building blocks of life" had been found on Mars. 

NASA wanted to take four astronauts to Mars, but the final mission design specified that only three astronauts would take the trip. A nuclear rocket vehicle would take the astronauts to Mars.  Two astronauts would descend to the surface of Mars in a chemically-powered lander, while one astronaut stayed in the nuclear-powered  rocket vehicle which would keep orbiting Mars. After three months, the Mars lander would return to the nuclear rocket vehicle, and the three astronauts would return to Earth. 

The landing craft had no problem descending to the surface of Mars. At the moment of landing, Mission Commander Ned Jackson announced triumphantly, "Today, the planets; tomorrow the stars!" 

Jackson was very gung-ho about the possibility of discovering life on Mars.  He and his fellow astronaut Frank Sellers got busy gathering soil samples from the crater where they had landed. It was believed that the crater was once a pond long, long ago. 

The astronauts took the soil samples to the large scientific instruments inside the lander, and began analyzing them. But they found no sign of currently existed life. Nor could they find any sign that life had once existed in the gathered soil.  The soil did not even have any amino acids or nucleotides. 

"If at first you don't suceeed, try, try again," said Jackson. "Let's keep gathering more soil samples."

"But maybe it's a waste of time," said Sellers. "Maybe there never was life on Mars."

"Mars once had lots of water," said Jackson. "The origin of life couldn't have been some kind of miracle. It must be something that happens automatically whenever there's enough water and enough time."

So the men spent weeks gathering more and more soil samples, and they kept analyzing them, using the fancy instruments onboard the lander. Still no trace of life was found.

"Mission un-accomplished," said Sellers. "We'll just have to tell the world we struck out." 

"No, there's got to be life here," said Jackson. "If it's not in the soil, then it must be hidden in the rocks." 

So the men started gathering rocks, and bringing them to the lander. They pulverized the rocks, in order to analyze them. This created lots of dust inside the lander that irritated Sellers very much. But no sign of life was found. 

"So now that we have a filthy, dusty lander vehicle, we're still empty-handed," said Sellers.

"If life isn't in the small rocks, it must be in great big rocks," said Jackson. 

"We have no way to break open big rocks," complained Sellers.

Jackson then announced a strange plan.  The men would gather quite a few big boulders and take them back to the lander. They would then lift off, and return to the nuclear-powered rocket orbiting Mars. The boulders could be broken up on Earth, where a check for life inside the boulders could be made.  Sellers thought this plan made no sense, but Jackson was insistent. 

Jackson prodded Sellers to help haul more and more boulders into the lander, until finally a great heavy mass of boulders had been gathered and brought into the lander. 

"This is crazy," said Sellers. "With all this weight, lifting off will be a gamble." 

"We've got to do it," said Jackson. "I think we can improvise some booster chemicals to super-charge our lander's fuel, to make it perform better. I remember some paper saying that a certain combination of chemicals will make our rocket fuel work 20% better." 

The chemicals were added to the lander's rocket fuel. Then the two men got in their spacesuits, strapped themselves into their seats, and revved up the lander's rockets to ascend into the sky.

At first things seemed to go well. The lander started to rise into the Martian sky, rising 1000 meters.

But then the chemical rocket engines seemed to sputter. 

"We have too much weight!" yelled Sellers. "We haven't got enought rocket thrust!"

"It's got to work!" said Jackson.

Finally the chemical rockets of the lander stalled entirely, making a sputtering noise like some car running out of gas. The lander began to fall back to Mars. 

"Try and restart the rockets!" yelled Jackson.

"It's no use!" cried Sellers.

The lander vehicle crashed back on Mars, hitting its ground at a speed at 70 meters per second. 

Strangely, Sellers and Jackson then found themselves apparently floating around inside their lander. Sellers looked down and saw two bodies still strapped into seats of the lander. 

"Who the hell are those two bodies below us?" asked Sellers. "And why are we floating around?"

"There must be a scientific explanation," said Jackson. "Probably our falling back to the Mars surface created a temporary gaseous disturbance which is temporarily elevating us in the air. No doubt we'll float back to the floor in a few seconds."

But a minute passed, and that didn't happen. Still floating about, Sellers took a good look through the cracked helmet visors of the spacesuits strapped into the chairs. He saw the motionless faces of Sellers and Jackson, frozen in an expression of horror. 

"Those are our own faces in those suits!" said Sellers. "What the hell is going on?"

"Well, I guess that rules out my previous hypothesis," said Jackson. "But I have another explanation. When we hit the ground, we probably suffered a concussion that has caused hallucinations. We're not really floating in the air. We're still in our seats. In a few seconds the hallucination will end."

But minutes passed, and such a thing didn't happen. Sellers began to panic. 

"I think I know what happened!" said Sellers. "When we crashed back to Mars, our bodies died! And our souls have floated out of our dead bodies!"

"No, that can't be!" said Jackson. "They're must be a scientific explanation. Maybe this is just some weird Mars gravity anomaly that is causing us to float about, or some strange quantum  fluctuation."

"Look at the arms of your body that is floating around," said Sellers. "They aren't solid arms, but kind of transparent shining ghost-arms, just like mine." 

"I see what you mean," said Jackson. "That's probably just an optical illusion, possibly caused by eye damage we suffered in our crash." 

Jackson was very good at this type of thing. He and his colleagues had been doing it for many years. They could quickly dream up reasons for thinking they were seeing exactly what they wanted to see, even when before them was something that looked like something totally different. Whenever they saw something that seemed to defy what they wanted to believe, they always had some speculation to explain away the undesired observations. And when many thousands or millions of other people saw things that didn't fit in with the beliefs of Jackson and his colleagues, such observations were always explained away by some speculations, often by claims of hallucination.  When nature didn't act in the way expected, there was always some reason dreamed up why the unexpected result was some illusion that was not the real truth.  Jackson and his colleagues could pull out these "why you didn't see what you seemed to see" speculation stories with dazzling speed, which often involved claims that the reality was the exact opposite of what someone seemed to see.   

Finally there seemed to open a large mysterious hole at the top of the ruined lander. The hole had a kind of weird quickly-spinning vortex edge, and seemed to lead into some very long strange tunnel. Jackson and Sellers began to feel themselves sucked up by some mysterious force pushing them through the hole, and into the tunnel. Then they felt themselves traveling through the tunnel at dazzling speed, heading towards some unfathomable numinous light at its end. Coming from the end of the tunnel, both Jackson and Sellers could hear some magnificent choir of voices singing, "We are the brave astronauts who died, and you will soon meet us."

"Remember, this is all just a very complex and unusually vivid multi-sensory hallucination, with both of us experiencing exactly the same details because of a gigantically improbable series of coincidences that might happen only once in the history of the multiverse," said Jackson. "Don't believe a single thing you see, hear, or feel!"

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Can a dream give a forewarning of someone's death? In my post "When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death," I cite quite a few interesting cases of people who had a dream that seemed to foretell someone's death.  The interesting book "The Future Is Now" by Arthur Walter Osborn cites quite a few cases of dreams that foretold a death. On page 51 we hear of a woman who dreamed her young brother had died.  She soon learned her sister had a similar dream, on the same night. In the sister's dream the brother died from drowning. Not long after, the brother did die by drowning. In his paper "Can Death-Related Dreams Predict Future Deaths? Evidence from a Dream Journal Comprising Nearly 12,000 Dreams" Andrew Paquette reports having a dream of the death of a relative named Harmony a day before learning of her death.

As related in Volume 5 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, a man dreamed "three nights running" that his mother was dying. In one dream someone told him that his mother would last "but five weeks." Five weeks later his mother unexpectedly died.  In the same volume we read of a boy who told his mother that he had a vision of a Mr. Hall (who had died five months earlier) telling the boy that he would die from a heart problem on December 5 at 3:00 PM. Despite seeming to be in good health in the morning of December 5, he died of a heart problem on that day, at 3:10 PM. 

The Norwalk Gazette reported in 1873 that three boys died in a boating accident. The paper states this: "Last Friday (the day before the accident), Dr. Hays, an assistant teacher, and a man of medical attainments, remarked to a fellow-teacher, ' I have dreamed, two nights in succession, that three of our boys were drowned.' "

The following case was reported on page 224 of Volume 4 of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research:

 "In November, 1884, my daughter, then 16, said to me one morning, ' Oh, mother, I had a terrible dream last night about B. I dreamt that you, she, and I were walking along the street, coming, I thought, from some musical entertainment, as I heard the music still in the distance. Suddenly B. appeared faint, and leant against some railings we were passing at the time. I tried to support her against the railings, but she gradually subsided and fell to the ground dead. I thought I ran for a doctor, but could not find one, and in the confusion I awoke.' The dream seemed to have been a peculiarly vivid one, but after mentioning it to some other members of the family we thought no more of it. Just about a week, or rather more, after the dream, we were shocked to receive news of B.'s sudden death in the street coming from an afternoon operatic performance...She had become faint close to some railings, and for a minute leant against them, then gradually fell to the ground dead."

On page 577 of Volume 11 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, we read an account of  "a dream which came... three times at long intervals, and which was at last fulfilled." The first time a female dreamed that her beloved uncle (who had raised her during her childhood) died:

"I knew in my dream that my uncle had been found dead by the side of a certain bridle-path about three miles from the house— a field-road where I had often ridden with him, and along which he often rode when going to fish in a neighbouring lake. I knew that his horse was standing by him, and that he was wearing a dark homespun suit of cloth made from the wool of a herd of black sheep which he kept. I knew that his body was being brought home in a waggon with two horses, with hay in the bottom, and that we were waiting for his body to arrive. Then in my dream the waggon came to the door ; and two men well known to me — one a gardener, the other the kennel huntsman — helped to carry the body up the stairs, which were rather narrow."

The female told the uncle about the dream, and made him promise "never to go alone by that particular road." We then read this narration by the female:

"I dreamt it again with all its details the same as before, and again with the same profoundly disturbing effect. I told my uncle, and said to him that I felt sure that he had been neglecting his promise, and riding by that field-road alone. He admitted that he had occasionally done so, 'although,' he said, 'I think I have been very good on the whole.' He renewed the promise ; and again the impression grew weaker as four years passed by, during which I married and left his home."

After having the dream a third time, the female found that the uncle had a death as in the dream:

"His guests left him in [the] greatest spirits, and two days afterwards he died, and his body had been brought back as I describe, and he had been found half sitting and half lying in that very field-road, where I had three times seen him. He was dressed in the same homespun suit in which I had seen him in my dream. ...He had evidently felt faint, and slipped from his horse. The same two men whom I had seen in my dream as helping to carry the body had in fact done so."

The Cross Mountain mine disaster was a 1911 tragedy that killed many miners.  The New York Herald reported this about the event:

"After a terrific explosion, that shook the earth for a wide area, 207 men were entombed today in the Cross Mountain coal mine of the Knoxville Iron Company. Hugh Larue, a miner employed in the shaft, owes his life to a dream his wife had last night. When he arose this morning and prepared to go to his daily task Mrs. Larue refused to prepare his lunch for him to carry to the mines. She did not want him to work today. She then recited a dream she had. In her dream she saw scores of miners with their heads blown off being carried out of the mine entrance as she and her little children stood at the mine’s mouth. Larue had not missed a day from his work for many months, but he was prevailed upon to remain out of the mines. It was only a short time after Mrs. Larue told her story that the disaster occurred."

The author of the book Dreams and Premonitions reports getting this account from an acquaintaince:

“I rarely dream, but several weeks before my husband passed on I dreamed of his death. I seemed to be taken into our living room where the casket was placed and saw him surrounded by floral pieces bearing the customary cards. As my husband was a splendid type of physical strength and had never been ill, except for an occasional cold, the dream made little impression upon me. I had no confidence in the reality of any kind of dreams and, after casually mentioning it to an intimate friend, I thought no more about it. Some weeks later my husband contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. My dream came vividly before me then, for every floral piece, every card, and the arrangement of the room, was identical with the dream.” 

Later in the same book we read that a Dr. L. H. Henley had a dream about a choking death of his sister, which was followed by a dream suggesting the death of his sister and his sister's wife: "Again at about 3 a. m., January 10, I awakened, and told Mrs. Henley that my sister was dying, sitting in a willow rocking chair, and that her husband Henry W. Parker, was near death in the adjoining room."  He soon learned by letter that his sister and his sister's wife had both died of pneumonia, which often produces a kind of choking death. 

On page 153 of the book "Some Cases of Prediction" by Edith Littleton, we read of a woman who had a vision of her young's son death:

"In the spring of 1920 while busy with my household duties, I had a vision like a flash of lightning of my little son, aged 9, in a coffin. Some weeks elapsed and again I had the same experience. In both cases I had a consciousness of the large size of the coffin."

Tragically the next summer the child did die after being hit by a car. The mother was brought to a room which had her son in a coffin, a coffin much bigger than his body. 

In the same book  we read of a woman who had a dream about her husband's death, which closely matched the actual events. Here is the narrative:

"In 1922 I had a very vivid dream which I told many people. I thought that my husband died whilst preaching and that I made my way through a great crowd to find him lying dead behind velvet curtains. The dream made a great impression on me, and many times when he was preaching I felt anxious, but I never could understand the velvet curtains. On November 9th 1924 my husband was asked to give the address at the Armistice Service in the Pier Pavilion - there were 2500 present and I sat with my step-daughter right at the back of the hall. I had never heard him more eloquent. As I was finding the last hymn someone said 'Your husband has fainted.' I looked up and saw him being carried from the platform. We made our way through the crowd and when I got on to the platform I found him lying dead behind the green velvet drop curtains."

On page 126 of the same book we read of a dream a woman had of an air disaster. The account by J. S. Wright is below:

 "On two occasions, weeks before the ill fated disaster to the British Airship R.101 at Beauvais - I dreamed of this terrible happening. The clarity of vision was astounding, every detail could be seen. I saw the huge ship plunge in flames, followed by a terrific explosion, almost frightening. Strange enough, the dream was repeated about a week after. "

The R.101 dirigible exploded on October 5, 1930, killing 48, in an explosion similar to that of the more famous Hindenberg explosion. Another person also had a dream of a dirigible crashing shortly before this disaster. He states this: "On October 3rd in 1930 I dreamed that I saw a large airship crash, after some preliminary difficulties in manoeuvring, on to the top of a hill and burst into flames." The source here states, "On October 5, 1930, the British airship R.101 crashed on a hill in Beauvais, France."

Sometimes a mere feeling (rather than a vision or death) may seem to foretell a death. In the book "Some Cases of Prediction" by Edith Littleton, we read of a woman who watched a newsreel showing people who would compete in a flying competition. Here is her account (confirmed by two other people):

"The Schneider Trophy race has, however, interested me very much always, I find it almost terribly exciting. The team that year consisted of R.A.F. men with the addition of one single Naval flying man, he stood out in the group by reason of his different uniform; when the group photograph was shown I noticed nothing except that he seemed very young and rather good-looking. Then we were shewn each man singly. As the photograph of this young naval man was thrown on the screen (it is his name I have forgotten) I received a sudden terrific sensation of shock, the shock of violent physical impact. I started so violently in my seat that my friend sitting next me whispered 'what's the matter?' I answered in great distress 'he's going to be killed, he's going to crash.' That was all. But either two, or three weeks later the newspapers came out with headlines 'Schneider Trophy Fatality,' the only Naval member of the team had crashed into the sea and had been killed instantly while on a practice flight." 

On page 148 we read the account of a woman who suddenly became convinced, for no known reason, that something dreadful was about to soon happen, and that she would soon hear a "terrrible cry." She told this to someone she met at a train station. A few minutes after returning to her home, she saw a woman come out of a house, her body on fire. The scream came from a man witnessing this horror. The woman died horribly. 

In one book we read of a Mrs. McAlpine who had a strange vision a week before someone committed suicide at the same spot where Mrs. McAlpine had the vision: 

"Being at length tired, I sat down to rest upon a rock at the edge of the water. My attention was quite taken up with the extreme beauty of the scene before me. There was not a sound of movement, except the soft ripple of the water on the sand at my feet. Presendy I felt a cold chill creep through me, and a curious stiffness in my limbs, as if I could not move, though wishing to do so. I felt frightened, yet chained to the spot, as if impelled to stare at the water straight in 

front of me. Gradually a black cloud seemed to rise, and in the midst of it I saw a tall man, in a suit of tweed, jump into the water and sink...About a week afterwards a Mr Espie, a bank clerk (unknown to me), committed suicide by drowning at that very spot. He left a letter for his wife, indicating that for some time he had contemplated his death."

In the book Glimpses of the Unseen by B. F. Austin, we read the following narrative by a Mrs. Eames:

"Mr. B. F. Eames, brother of my husband, was in the Army, East, in the cavalry as first lieutenant. I dreamed I saw him coming to me. He smiled and pulled open his vest and showed that he had been wounded — shot in the left lung. I said to him, 'Oh, are you not afraid it will kill you?' and he answered 'Yes,' and seemed to walk right on as if to meet other members of the troop. I looked after him and awoke. I felt sure that brother Ben was shot, and told my husband in the morning, and I dated this dream. In about eight or ten days we received a letter from Father Eames saying Ben was dead — had been shot in the left lung — and was buried, also that they had him removed and buried in their cemetery in West Halifax, Vt. It turned out that my dream had taken place, the next evening after the funeral. Now where did this come from ? No one had written me a word of it, yet I saw it clearly in this vision."

In the same book we read the following account by a George F. Clarke on page 50:

"In the autumn of 1863, a young man connected with one of the New Hampshire regiments, was stationed at Washington, D.C. His mother was a widow, and his only sister was teaching school in a neighboring town. Returning home one day she asked her mother if C , her brother in the army, had recently been heard from. She was answered in the negative, antl that he was well while last he wrote. The daughter replied 'I feel worried about him, for I had a strange dream a few nights ago. I thought that a carriage drove up to the house at midnight, and the driver delivered a telegram saying that C was very sick, and the next night another telegram came announcing his death.' The mother answered 'I had a similar dream about the same time." After retiring for the night they talked about the matter for some time. During the night a carriage drove up to the house, and the mother remarked 'the telegram has come.' And so it proved, saying that C was very sick, and requesting  the brother to come to Washington. He started as soon as possible, but had been gone only a few hours when a second dispatch was received announcing the death of the soldier, who had suddenly died before the arrival of the brother, after an illness of two or three days."

In a nineteenth century book, there is the account below, only one of countless accounts the book tells about a visionary called the Seeress of Prevorst:

"Three successive days before the death of her 

father, at a time that the news of his illness had not 

reached her, she saw, when she was awake, a coffin 

standing by her bed, which was covered by a short- 

cloth, on which lay a white cross. She was very 

much alarmed, and said she feared her father was 

dead, or sick. I comforted her by suggesting that 

some other person might be signified. She did not 

know how to interpret this covered coffin, as hither- 

to she had either seen coffins with the likeness of 

the person about to die lying in them, or the like- 

ness of the person about to be sick looking into 

them. On the morning of the 2d of May came the 

news of her father’s illness ; on the same evening he 

died ; whilst she in her sleep was much distressed, 

and intimated that she saw something grievous, 

which she would not tell us, in order that she might 

not know it when she was awake ; on the next came 

the news of his death."

In the same book we read the following:

"Dr. Bardili, a young man of talent, who quitted his country for America, and devoted himself much to the study of languages and mathematics — and who, according to the testimony of his friends, had not much faith in spiritual matters — says, in the last letter he ever wrote to them — which letter is still in their possession — 'The most extraordinary thing has lately happened to me : my friend Elwert, who died nine years ago at Wirtemberg, appeared to me, and said, 'Thou shalt soon die!' and what is more strange

is, that the day he appeared to me was the anniver-

sary of his own death.'  Shortly after writing this letter. Dr. B died, very unexpectedly."

In another book we read of a son who had a dream that his father had a fall, and died. At the same hour far away his father had tumbled down some stairs, and later died from gangrene arising from his hand injured in the fall.  A meta-analysis of experimental tests of ESP during dreams found strong evidence of a real effect, reporting a p-value of  5.19 × 10^-8 which means the probability of getting such results by chance was less than 1 in a 100 million.   

^{In recent months I have been having dreams dominated by themes of danger, death, and life-after-death, dreams very often involving the deceased (as described here). Only time will tell whether such dreams were premonitory.} 

Why We Do Not Understand the Origin of Any Adult Human Being

A common boast of modern scientists is that they understand the origin of the entire human species. But I maintain that they do not actually understand any such thing, and that they also do not even understand something much simpler: the origin of any single adult human being. 

Upon hearing such a statement, the average adult might  laugh and say, "Why, of course I understand my own origin." If asked to supply explicit details, a person might say something like, "I originated because my mother and father had sex, and my mother's egg was fertilized by my father's sperm." But if you state such an account, you are not explaining how you originated. You are merely explaining how your mother got pregnant.  You should not confuse understanding how your mother got pregnant with understanding how you originated. Explaining how you originated is a task very, very much harder than merely explaining how your mother got pregnant. 

There are two things we would need to explain before we can say that we understand the origin of an adult human being. The first thing we would need to explain is the origination of an adult human body,  a state of enormous hierarchical physical organization and also gigantically dynamic functionality. The second thing we would need to explain is the arrival of the mind of an adult human being. The second task should not be reduced to some mere "problem of consciousness," as if all that we need to explain is some mere awareness of any type.  The second task is the task of explaining all of the mental faculties of an adult human being. Such faculties include awareness, self-hood, thinking, memory acquistion, instant memory retrieval, and the preservation of memories for years.  Scientists have no credible explanation for either the arrival of an adult human body or the arrival of an adult human mind.  Let's look at why existing explanations don't get the job done. 

If someone defines a fertilized human egg as a human being, a definition that is very debatable, you might be able to say, "I understand the physical origin of a human being," and merely refer to a sperm uniting with an egg cell as such an origin.  But the question we are concerned with is whether anyone understands the physical origin of an adult human being. The physical structure of an adult human being is a state of organization millions of times more complex than a mere fertilized speck-sized egg cell.  (A human egg cell is about a tenth of a millimeter in length, but a human body occupies a volume of about 75 million cubic millimeters.) So you don't explain the physical origin of an adult human being by merely referring to the fertilization of an egg cell during or after sexual intercourse. 

We cannot explain the origin of an adult human body by merely using words such as "development" or "growth." Trying to explain the origin of an adult human body by merely mentioning a starting cell and mentioning "growth" or "development" is as vacuous as trying to explain the mysterious appearance of a building by saying that it appeared through "origination" or "construction."  If we were to find some mysterious huge building on Mars, we would hardly be explaining it by merely saying that it arose from "origination" or by saying that it appeared through "construction." When a person tries to explain the origin of a human body by merely mentioning "growth" or "development" or "morphogenesis," he is giving as empty an explanation as someone who tells you he knows how World War II started, because he knows that it was caused by "historical events."

There is a more specific account often told to try to explain the origin of an adult human body. The account goes something like this:

"Every cell contains a DNA molecule that is a blueprint for constructing a human., all the information that is needed. So what happens is that inside the body of a mother, this DNA plan for a human body is read, and the body of a baby is gradually constructed. It's kind of like a construction crew working from a blueprint to make a building."

The problem with this account is that while it has been told very many times, the story is just plain false. There is no such blueprint for a human being in human DNA. We know exactly what is in human DNA. It is merely low-level chemical information such as the sequence of amino acids that make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules. DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA is not a blueprint for making a human. DNA is not a recipe for making a human. DNA is not a program or algorithm for making a human. Not only does DNA not specify how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any organ or appendage or cell of a human. There are about 200 types of cells in human beings, each an incredibly organized thing (cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to factories or cities).  DNA does not specify how to make any of these 200 types of cells. Cells are built from smaller structural units called organelles. DNA does not even specify how to make such low-level organelles. 

Here are a few relevant quotes by authorities:

• On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore, says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.” 
• In an essay pointing out the vast complexities and interlocking dependencies of even simpler aspects of biology such as angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels),  Jonathan Bard of Oxford University states, "It is pushing the boundaries of belief too far to believe that it is helpful to see the genome as holding a program." 
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation for it, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Physics PhD Eric Heden states, "The molecular coding within DNA, rich and vast as it is, falls impossibly short of being able to supply the informational guidance needed to supervise the development and moment-by-moment cellular activities of living organisms."
• In their book "The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma" (page 148)  biologists  Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart state, "DNA provides no instruction on where to place the proteins in the cell. There is no genetic information for large-scale cellular organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Physician James Le Fanu states the following:

  
  

  "The genome projects were predicated on the reasonable assumption that spelling out the full sequence of genes would reveal the distinctive genetic instructions that determine the diverse forms of life. Biologists were thus understandably disconcerted to discover that precisely the reverse is the case. Contrary to all expectations, there is a near equivalence of 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves. It was no less disconcerting to learn that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of both the mouse and our primate cousins...There is in short nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly has six legs, a pair of wings and a dot-sized brain and that we should have two arms, two legs and a mind capable of comprehending the history of our universe."

The lack of any specification for building a human in DNA is only one of two major reasons why a reading from DNA cannot explain the physical origin of a newborn baby or an adult. The second major reason is that there is nothing in the human body that would be capable of reading a DNA specification for making a human, if such a thing happened to exist.  Consider what goes on when a house is built. Dumping some building materials and a blueprint will never cause a house to be built. The house can only get built if there are intelligent blueprint readers smart enough to read the complex blueprints, and carry out their instructions. With about 200 types of cells, each so complex they are often compared to factories, a human body is something a million times harder to build than a mere house. If there were some instructions for building a human in DNA, such instructions would be so complex that they would require something extremely intelligent to interpret such instructions and carry them out. But we know of no such intelligence existing in a human womb where a baby grows. 

The "DNA as blueprint" idea is further disproved by the C-value paradox under which many relatively simple organisms have genomes much larger than more complex organisms. For example, a certain flower from Japan has a genome 50 times longer than the human genome, and quite a few amphibians have genomes 10 times bigger than the human genome. 

There is no blueprint or recipe or program for making a human in human DNA, and there is nothing intelligent enough in a human womb to read and execute such immensely complicated instructions if they happened to exist. So the physical origin of each full-sized human body is a miracle far beyond our understanding.  

We lack any understanding of how the supremely hierarchical organization of an adult human body arises. Consider all the different levels of organization. Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into the human body.  There is nothing in a speck-sized human egg that explains how most of those different levels of organization could arise. 

We take for granted the miracle of a speck-sized egg growing into a human body a million times more organized than such a cell. Why is that? Mainly because it is something that happens most of the time. It seems that we will not be astonished by any transformation, no matter how inexplicable it may seem, as long as it happens most of the time.  Imagine if you lived on a planet in which you could plant acorns in the ground, and they would grow into three-story houses complete with electricity and running water. You would not think such a thing was very marvelous if it happened most of the times that acorns were planted in the ground, and if such a thing had been happening for as long as your race could remember.  The arising of a full-sized human body from a speck-sized fertilized egg millions of times less complex and organized is a marvel a thousand times more impressive than a three-story house with electricity and running water arising from an acorn planted in the ground.  We do not at all understand how this marvel happens. We do not understand the physical origin of any adult human body. In a section entitled  "Developmental Biology," a paper by a University of Oxford biologist confesses, "We...rarely understand what is going on in any detailed way."

Below we see the very large number of interlocking dependencies in merely a tiny fragment of human biochemistry. Showing such a diagram for the whole human body would require a similar graph, but one that was wall-sized.  And such a wall-sized graph would merely skim the surface, because systems biology is in its infancy. 

From the scientific paper here

There is a second major reason why we do not understand the origin of any adult human being.  The second reason is that we do not understand how there appears any such thing as the mind of an adult human. We are told a story about this matter, but it is a false story. The story goes like this:

"All your mental capabilites are just produced by the brain. So as a child grows bigger, and his brain grows bigger, his mental powers gradually increase." 

But the idea that the brain explains the main types of human phenomena is dead wrong. Although they have the very bad habit of constantly making groundless claims that brains explain minds, scientists have no understanding of how neurons could create any of the most important aspects of the human mind. Specifically:

• No neuroscientist has ever given a credible account of how neurons could produce any such thing as consciousness or self-hood.
• No neuroscientist has ever given a credible account of how neurons could produce conceptual understanding or abstract ideas. 
• Far from resembling an information storage system for storing learned data, the brain has none of the hallmarks of such systems. 
• No one has ever presented a credible theory of how human learned information and conceptual information and episodic memories could ever be translated into neural states or synapse states. 
• Brains seem to have nothing like a mechanism for reading or writing memories. 
• No one has ever discovered any non-genetic information stored in any animal brain, nor has anyone discovered any of the token repetition that might exist if brains stored memories. 
• Scientists lack any credible explanation of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory.  

Such items are mainly just shortfalls in which neuroscientists have failed to produce the type of evidence they would need to produce to substantiate claims that brains produce minds and that brains store memories.  There are also many known facts and discoveries that discredit such claims, including the following:

• Common facts of human experience (such as our ablilty to instantly form permanent new memories) stand in opposition to widely spread but groundless claims that brains store memories through slow mechanisms such as "synapse strengthening." 
• The average lifetime of proteins in synapses (the reputed storage place of memories) is less than two weeks, 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years).
• Human minds and memories are well preserved even when half of a brain is surgically removed to stop severe epileptic seizures, which completely contradicts the claim that the human brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories. 
• There are many case histories of people with good minds and average or above-average intelligence even when almost all of their brains were destroyed by disease. 
• Inside the human brain there exists many types of severe signal noise which should make it impossible for the human brain to be the explanation for memory recall when can occur almost flawlessly in many people, and accurate human calculation such as occurs in savants. 
• Because signal transmission is relatively slow in synapses and dendrites, human brains should be way too slow to explain instant human recall and very fast numerical calculation such as we see in mathematical savants. 
• Abundant evidence for human extrasensory perception (evidence which has been systematically gathered and published for almost 200 years) suggests the human mind must involve something far beyond the brain, such evidence being inexplicable under any neural hypothesis. 
• A large body of evidence for out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences (such as discussed here, here, here and here ) suggest that the human mind can operate outside of the brain, and that the mind can often keep operating well when the brain has shut down during cardiac arrest. 

It is very clear that the human mind and human memory is something far beyond the understanding of today's neuroscientists. It is far from true that such neuroscientists "pretty much understand" the origin of an adult's mind. To the contrary, the things mentioned above tell us in the loudest voice that the notions of such neuroscientists about the origins of an adult human mind are mostly erroneous, involving an untrue assumption that minds and memory can be explained by brains.  

Long before anyone understood the enormous functional complexities of the human body's cells and the gigantic fine-tuning of the human body's biochemistry, scientists began spreading the boastful legend that they had figured out the origin of the human race.  To help maintain this legend, scientists have found it necessary to commit many intellectual errors, such as these:

(1) the error of telling us the enormous lie that human minds do not differ fundamentally from animal minds;
(2) the error of telling the false fairy tale that a human body forms because a specification of a human is read from DNA (a molecule that contains no specification of human anatomy);
(3) the error of ignoring a host of anomalies and massive evidence for paranormal human abilities incompatible with the claim that human minds are merely the products of brains;
(4) the error of habitually portraying supremely complex biological systems as being far simpler than they are;
(5) the error of ignoring the extremely hierarchical organization and fine-tuned intricate behavior of vastly complex dynamic biological systems, and suggesting that such marvels of organization with a multitude of interlocking and cross-reliant dependencies can be achieved by a  mere accumulation of random tiny changes (a biology paper by a University of Oxford biologist tells us "the assumption that speciation occurs through the slow accumulation of simple mutations is simply wrong");
(6) the error of ignoring a great deal of evidence about the human brain, evidence telling us that it does not have the characteristics it would have if it were the source of the human mind and the storage place for memories that can last for fifty years or more. 

Once we identify how these errors are being committed, we can realize the humbling truth: that our scientists (who cannot even explain the reproduction of an average human cell) do not understand the origin of the human race, and do not even understand the origin of any single human adult, because they are unable to credibly explain either the appearance of the mountainously organized wonder that is the adult human body or the arising of any adult mind.  

So we do not at all understand the origin of an adult's body, and we are just as ignorant about the origin of an adult's mind.  The arising of an adult human with such stratospheric levels of hierarchical bodily organization and also with the common features of an adult human mind (such as imagination, self-hood, abstract reasoning and instant accurate recall of very old memories) are both miracles of origination a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists.  

The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission

This week NASA successfully landed a new rover on Mars, and the mission (called Perseverance) will be part of a search for life on Mars. Is this a cause to rejoice? No, it is not, because unfortunately the mission has a poor design. Because of this poor design, you will not be hearing any "NASA discovered life on Mars" announcement anytime in the next few years. 

Here is how a NASA page describes the mission:

"The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life, which will advance NASA's quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. The rover has a drill to collect core samples of Martian rock and soil, then store them in sealed tubes for pickup by a future mission that would ferry them back to Earth for detailed analysis."

Get the idea? The Perseverance Rover does not have instruments capable of clearly detecting microbial life (the only type of life that may be possible on Mars), unless by some great stroke of luck such microscopic life left unambiguous visible signs of itself (an effect we have not seen in quite a few years of previous Mars rover exploration). The specs for one of its key instruments says that it "can see features as small as a grain of salt," which is not good enough to detect microbes. The specs for another instrument mentions only being able to see things as small as 7 square millimeters. 

So the plan is to just have the rover dig up dirt in particular areas, store the dirt in tubes, and then dump the tubes on the ground, in hopes that maybe later some currently unfunded mission -- manned or unmanned -- will retrieve such tubes and bring them back to Earth (where the samples can be scanned with instruments like electron microscopes that can view at microscopic resolutions).  

This is an absurd way to spend money looking for extraterrestrial life. The Perseverance Rover mission cost billions, and some future mission (not even funded) that might retrieve these surface “caches” would cost billions more. The chance of actually finding clear evidence that life once existed on Mars through the partial help of this mission would be very, very small, because of the hostility of the surface of Mars, the difficulty of reaching previously dumped soil caches and returning them to Earth, the high chance of finding merely ambiguous evidence (discussed below), and because of the very high unlikelihood of life originating on any particular planet by any abiogenesis chance processes. There would be a high risk that the samples would never be returned, because no one has ever done anything like retrieving samples from another planet and returning them to Earth.

A manned mission to Mars could retrieve these “sample caches,” but why would the astronauts even go to the trouble of searching for them, when it would be much easier for them to just drill themselves to get a soil sample wherever they were on Mars? 

The design of the Perseverance Rover is absurdly poor compared to the design originally proposed for a European mission that will land on Mars in 2023. The original design for that mission was to land a heavy rover equipped with some instruments of serious power that could have detected microbes in the soil or past signs of life. But it seems that this mission (originally named ExoMars) has now been scaled down to be much lighter, and have much less instrument power. The latest design for this rover (now called the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover) is a stripped-down design that doesn't carry the powerful instruments previously planned. Now instead of being billed as a mission to find life, the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover is now being merely billed as a mission to find building blocks of life on Mars. 

What this means is for quite a few years you will not be reading any announcement that life has been found on Mars, thanks to the incompetence of our Mars mission planners, who keep sending rovers to Mars, but keep failing to have those probes capable of finding microbes (past or present) if they exist on Mars. 

By the year 2026 it will be about 50 years of sending spacecraft to Mars without landing any powerful life-searching instruments on Mars (the last attempt at such a thing being the 1976 Viking mission). You just have to wonder: do these guys really want to resolve the issue of whether Mars has or once had life?  They don't seem to be designing Mars landers as if they really wanted to answer that question.  Perhaps what's going on is something like this:

(1) Maybe the Mars mission designers suspect there is scarcely a snowball's chance in hell of any type of life on Mars.

(2) Maybe they also realize that the sooner we find out Mars is lifeless, the quicker people will lose interest in Mars, and regard it as just a boring dead rock (a place we shouldn't waste any more money on). 

(3) So maybe our spacecraft designers are trying to string things out as long as possible, so that spacecraft designers can keep busy sending things to Mars, without there being some negative tests that force scientists to say that Mars doesn't have life and never had life (a conclusion that might cause the public to no longer support sending spacecraft to Mars). 

The preceding is merely a speculation.  Another possibility is that the bad design of the Perseverance mission is one of those cases when a bad design comes from a committee compromise. The Perseverance mission includes a drone-like device called a helicopter. We can imagine some designers saying "we should concentrate on searching Mars for life" and other designers saying "no, we want to have fun flying a drone around on Mars." So we may have ended up with the Perseverance mission design as a kind of compromise, in which we got merely a half-measure life-searching capability, and also the drone. 

Committee compromises have resulted in some of the worst designs in the history of innovation.  Conversely, the Apollo 11 spacecraft was a great design. There were no conflicting goals there. The designers wanted to do exactly one thing (land a man on the moon, and return him), and they created a great design to do just that one thing. 

At the CNN website we have a story that epitomizes the kind of fawning credulous cheerleading that goes on in the coverage of science news, rather than the critical tough-minded journalism we need about science topics.  After enthusing that the landing of the Perseverance rover was "the happy moment we all needed," we are assured that the rover is "essentially part of us" because "nearly 11 million people submitted their names to hitch a ride with Perseverance on silicon chips."  More poor design, since you easily could have had the IRS supply a computer file with the names of every tax-paying citizen, allowing every taxpayer to say, "My name is on Mars."  And who cares whether there are microscopic bytes on Mars with someone's name?

The reporter of this story has got so emotional that it seems all objectivity has been lost. We read this:

"For me, it's become a very personal thing. Following the journey of this rover from concept to amazing reality has been an inspiring one. Along the way, I've met so many of the people who have dedicated years of their lives this mission. It's impossible not to feel caught up in their motivations, hopes and passion to explore...It's impossible not to feel some inexplicable bond to this 6-wheeled robot."

But some of us who aren't so misty-eyed and choked up by the rover landing have noticed the poor design of this Perseverance mission. As part of the hype of the mission, a former NASA administrator has made the false claim that "the building blocks of life exist all over Mars." The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of microscopic life are protein molecules and nucleic acids. No one has found any cells or protein molecules or nucleic acids on Mars.  The building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life are the twenty amino acids used by living things, and the four nucleotides used by nucleic acids.  None of these 24 things has been found on Mars.  The organic compounds referred to by this former NASA administrator are merely carbon compounds with no biological function.  For many decades our scientists have been making baloney claims that "building blocks of life" are all over the place in outer space. Such claims were false when they were made so often fifty years ago by Carl Sagan, and are just as false today.  The fact that none of the real 24 building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life has been discovered on Mars is one of the strongest reasons for thinking Mars has never had living things of any type. 

The NASA mission overview page here doesn't even sound like the mission planners have any hope of detecting current life on Mars.  We merely hear of looking for "signs of past microbial life." One problem with that is that microbes do not leave visible fossils.  So any "signs of past microbial life" (presumably got from returning soil samples using a follow-up mission) would probably be inconclusive ambiguous evidence that failed to prove that life once existed on Mars. A relevant science news story states the following:

"When it comes to finding fossils of very ancient microbial life —whether on Earth or on other worlds, such as Mars — the odds are just not in our favor. Actual microbial life-forms are much less likely to become safely fossilized in rocks compared with nonbiological structures that happen to mimic their shapes, new research finds. The finding suggests that Earth’s earliest rocks may contain abundant tiny fakers — minuscule objects masquerading as fossilized evidence of early life — researchers report online January 28 in Geology."

It is interesting that the issue discussed above is one that should cause us to doubt all claims that life on Earth is billions of years old, since the evidence cited for such claims could easily be misidentifications. Conversely, we have decent fossils from the Cambrian Era about 540 million years ago.

In an opinion piece at www.nbcnews.com, astronomer Seth Shostak gives us some rather silly talk about what would happen if "long-expired Martian bacteria" were to be discovered.  He says this: 

"The discovery of long-expired Martian bacteria would permanently change humanity’s view of its own importance....it would be a near-certainty that in other places among the trillion planets of the Milky Way, life has evolved to a state of self-aware intelligence....Suddenly, we would confront the likelihood that everything we accomplish has parallels in the actions of unseen others, and that what we find beautiful and worthwhile must have a billion other definitions elsewhere."

This is very wrong.  The half-life of DNA is about 521 years. If some soil returned from Mars was deemed to have long-expired life dating from many millions of years ago, we would have no or very little extant DNA allowing us to tell whether such DNA arose independently on Mars, whether life from Earth had come from Mars, or whether life on Mars had come from Earth. Although it sounds incredible, scientists think it quite possible that life could naturally travel between Earth and Mars, during very rare events such as a comet skimming though an upper atmosphere containing microbes, and then eventually landing on another planet.  So if we got some Martian soil that seemed to have evidence of microbes that lived millions of years ago when Mars was wet, evidence that would be ambiguous and debatable, this would never prove that life had independently arisen from separate events on Earth and Mars.  Even if you had proved that microbe life had independently arisen on Earth and Mars, that would not show a likelihood that large-scale life such as mammals had arisen more than once, and would not show a likelihood that self-aware life had arisen more than once. We still lack any credible theory of how mere microbes could give rise to gigantically organized large-sized organisms, and we still lack any credible theory of how minds like humans could naturally arise, contrary to the unfounded boasts of Darwinism enthusiasts who lack any theory explaining mountainous levels of biological organization in mammals, and lack any credible theory explaining the origin of minds like ours.  

As a method for searching for extraterrestrial life, trying to return soil samples from Mars in a two-part mission is a case of getting ridiculously little "bang for the buck."  The total cost of those two Mars missions would be in excess of 4 billion dollars.  Only a single area of a single planet would be checked; the result would probably be negative or ambiguous or inconclusive; and the best possible outcome would be some microbes of interest only to specialists. By comparison, for one fortieth of the cost  (only 100 million dollars) the privately funded Breakthrough Listen project is searching for intelligent life in more than a million solar systems, by listening for radio messages. So why is the US spending so much on Mars missions, and so little on searching for extraterrestrials by using radio telescopes? It's largely because NASA is a privileged fiefdom that we have got in the very bad habit of giving 20 billions of dollars to each year.  NASA is like some billionaire's daughter who believes she is entitled to a weekly allowance of a million dollars. You would think that with all that money doled out to it, we would always get solid mission designs. 

It is interesting that the Perseverance rover has landed on Mars at a time when the US death toll from COVID-19 approaches 500,000.  But we haven't heard about any large-scale US investigation into the origin of COVID-19. It seems the US government has billions to spend on missions that might (after many years) tell us something about the origin of probably-nonexistent and long-extinct microbes on Mars, but that such a government doesn't have much interest in funding a full investigation into the origin of a definitely existing microbe that has killed almost half a million people here in the US. Very strange.  And what if some sample returned from Mars were to have microbes? It might lead to some pandemic worse than COVID-19.