NASA Indoctrinates Kids to Expect Aliens
Students in public schools have no chance to hear the reasons why life cannot “emerge” from rocks and water.
The recent landing of the Perseverance Rover has ramped up talk about life on Mars (17 Feb 2021). In all cases in secular media, the assumption is made that life (if it exists) would have made itself by chance. Another common assumption is that once simple life emerges, nothing stops it from proceeding all the way to intelligent brains because of the assumed creative power of Darwinian evolution.
Advocates of intelligent design and creation are always loaded for bear to address origin-of-life issues. They never get the chance to explain the reasons, though, because Big Science and Big Media and Big Education control the messaging to students.
Mars in a Minute: Why is Curiosity Looking for Organics? (NASA/JPL). The video aimed at children argues that finding organic molecules is equivalent to finding the conditions for life. See also the classroom activity “Looking for Life” aimed at grades 4-8.
Organics are carbon-based molecules – key ingredients to life. If Curiosity finds organics in ancient rocks, there’s a better chance Mars once had good conditions for small life forms called microbes.
Curious Kids: We have been trying to contact aliens – but do they want to contact us? (The Conversation). An eight-year-old student named Sai asks if aliens want to contact us. Jacco van Loon, astrophysicist and Director of Keele Observatory steps up to the microphone in the “Curious Kids” service of The Conversation to give the official Darwinian answer. He admits that nobody knows what aliens are thinking, but he never questions the existence of aliens, and why they must be there.
The question presumes that aliens do exist. And again, because we haven’t found any yet, we don’t know if they do. It is possible they may exist, for one simple reason: we exist. Whatever made the likes of bacteria evolve into complex bodies with intelligent brains on Earth may have also occurred on another planet.
He mentions “whatever” not “whoever.” The idea of a Creator with intelligence is completely ignored. Notice, too, that he assumes that “evolution” has the power to take life from bacteria to the human brain by “whatever” – the impersonal, chance-based Stuff Happens Law.
Time is the magic wand that lets miracles happen by chance, van Loon goes on to explain, but his answer is based on ignorance, not observation.
On Earth this transformation seems to have taken place quite suddenly some 700 million years ago. At that time the Earth was already almost 4 billion years old, and had been inhabited by simple lifeforms such as bacteria for much of that time. Why did it not happen sooner? And what made it happen? Until we find the answers to those questions we cannot tell how likely it is that it also occurred elsewhere.
It is fallacious to build a case on an example of one. van Loon speculates that since humans are curious and want companionship, aliens probably want that, too.
Some aliens might simply not be interested in life beyond their own world.
On the other hand, it may be that life such as ours is actually very common. With so many worlds and civilisations to choose from, we may simply not yet have caught their eye. If that is the case, we might soon detect alien life around nearby stars for ourselves.
Poor Sai never had a chance to hear an alternative view that life was created for a purpose. He was never taught that the requirements for life preclude a naturalistic origin. He will keep looking up to the silent stars waiting for ET to phone home.
Has life existed beyond Earth? (Purdue University). This is a piece about Briony Horgan, associate professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University, who is a member of the NASA Perseverance Rover team, and how she is “going to great lengths” to find out if life ever existed on Mars. This piece is typical of NASA press releases that assume that if life ever existed on Mars, it evolved—it was not created. As for why Jezero Crater was selected for the rover’s landing site,
“… we think Jezero Crater is the best location to search for evidence that life existed on Mars, if it ever did. And what we find will help us learn more about whether or not we are alone in the universe.“
Students are inspired to be like Briony, growing up to be good evolutionists, and eventually, to become brainy scientists like Dr Horgan, who believe that water and rock are sufficient to produce living organisms and brains.
Life of a pure Martian design (University of Wien). Scientists at this university put earth life on soil from a Martian meteorite to see if it would grow. Fallacy alert: this has nothing to do with whether Mars life exists. At most, it shows how hardy Earth life is. They think it gives NASA a way to look for “biosignatures” on Mars to distinguish life from non-life. But what if Mars life (if it ever existed) is completely different from Earth life? (Fallacy alert #2).
Could game theory help discover intelligent alien life? (Phys.org). The answer is, naturally, “It could, and if pigs had wings, they could fly.” Like the previous example, this SETI article assumes what aliens are thinking.
“Soon we should have the first catalog of planets that may be inhabited by civilisations who already know something about our World. They may know just enough to be tempted to send a message. These are the worlds we really need to focus in on. If they know about game theory they’ll expect us to be listening.”
The above is a string of empty speculations held together by the word “may.” But if the assumption is wrong, the conclusions are completely bogus.
The above articles are representative of the literature in Big Science, Big Media and Big Education about life beyond Earth. Only evolutionists need apply. Life must be the product of unguided natural processes, wherever it might be found. By titillating students with the juicy prospect of life on other planets, they keep them hooked into a Darwinian mindset.