A lot of what I write about on this blog, and also a lot of what I hope to do as a science fiction writer, comes from reading actual scientific research. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good (I think) at wading through all that scientific jargon. But sometimes I invest my time in reading something and… well, it just doesn’t give me a whole lot to work with.
There’s been a lot of press lately about how asteroids and comets deliver loads and loads of organic material to Mars, and what that may mean for our search for Martian life. I thought this would make an excellent Molecular Monday post (today’s post is part of a biweekly series called Molecular Mondays, blah blah, you know the spiel).
But after reading the actual paper, I can’t help but feel that this research has been overhyped.
Don’t get me wrong! It’s good research, as far as I’m able to judge, without any of the usual red flags I’ve learned to watch out for. But it’s based on a computer simulation, a simulation that depends upon quite a few assumptions about asteroid and comet populations in our Solar System. The authors are upfront and honest about this, and they do a good job explaining why they believe their assumptions are justified. This article from IFL Science calls these assumptions “reasonable assumptions,” and that may be true.
But still… this paper makes a lot of assumptions!
The general idea that asteroids and comets deliver organic material to Mars (and other planets) makes sense to me. The conclusion that we should search impact craters on Mars for organics seems sensible enough. It’s just… I don’t know, maybe I’ve missed something important (it wouldn’t be the first time), but with so many assumptions in play, I can’t take any of the specifics from this paper too seriously.
P.S.: I didn’t really talk about chemistry in this post, which is sort of off brand for Molecular Mondays. So I’ll just remind everyone that the word organic does not mean what you may think it means. You can have organic chemicals and organic chemistry without having living organisms.
Planet Pailly 
In a paper such as this, I’d expect to see the authors exploring variations in their input parameters, to see how sensitive their results are to their assumptions. otherwise, as you say, it’s hard to know whether we should have confidence in their predictions.
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That makes sense. I think I remember something about that in the paper, so maybe there’s more to this than I thought.
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