I really hoped I would be able to get through three editions of this email without talking about aliens and misrepresentation of space science, but I am far too weak and this story is far too good.
This week: Aliens in the Dragon Palace.
Here’s what happened.
Let’s start with a tale of success:
In 2020, the Japanese space agency, JAXA, landed a capsule in the Australian outback full of tiny pieces of rock. The rocks are pretty special. They were collected by JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft from a 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid that orbits the sun known as “Ryugu” — the translation for this is “Dragon Palace.”
I wrote a big story about this mission back in 2021 if you’re interested in how it all went down, but basically the spacecraft scooped up rock from the surface of the asteroid, then bombed the asteroid and scooped up rock from the subsurface of the asteroid.
Then it brought it all home in December 2020.
For the past 18 months, JAXA scientists have been studying these rocks, putting them through a bunch of tests to understand their chemistry and what lurks inside them. And last week, they revealed that Ryugu contains amino acids, the stuff life uses to build proteins.
This discovery had been uncovered by the press in Japan and quickly spread around the world. Then, we got this:
What’s wrong with this…??
Well. A lot. As I mentioned in a tweet:
“Imagine working your entire life to understand the cosmos, setting up a decades-long mission to collect samples from a distant asteroid, failing once, then succeeding spectacularly ... only to have it reduced to absolute nonsense like this with glowing green dudes.”
After I got Unreasonably Mad Online, the Sun rejigged their headline… though they kept the ridiculous image of a glowing green alien, for reasons unknown. The new headline was:
Key ingredients for life found on asteroid as hunt for ALIENS progresses
This is a constant problem in space sciences, especially when it comes to chemistry. Every weird signal or amino acid we find immediately gets tied to aliens because aliens are absolutely great fodder for the media ecosystem we exist in.
If you see a story about some dull grey rock from space giving us insights into the early solar system, are you going to click? What about if the chemistry of that same dull rock is overhyped as a “breakthrough in hunt for aliens.”
Hayabusa2 was never designed to discover microbes or really progress the hunt for alien life, either. It was, perhaps, expected that we might find chemical compounds and amino acids that hint at these compounds arriving on Earth billions of years ago, but we can’t draw any conclusions yet. In a nutshell, discovering them in the rock is really fucking cool but it gets us no closer to understanding aliens.
The problem with constantly hitting the public over the head with this “aliens” stuff is that it just wears readers down to the point they stop caring or they have an inflated notion of what discovering life on other planets might actually look like. And there IS an interesting story to tell in the new results from Ryugu — a really interesting story that requires only a smidgen of imagination outside of Scary Green Guys to help it along.
Science journalists should be telling those stories and making it clear why they’re important. These stories should leave the reader excited about future research and ensure the reader is interested not in how the idea is used (“Our hunt for aliens is progressing”) but the idea itself (“Studying asteroids gives us the opportunity to understand how the solar system came to be”).
That builds trust in The Process of science and not The Outcome. And that’s important because The Process isn’t about absolute truths.
We are — humans are — still mostly ignorant to the grand workings of the universe.
Yes, we know a lot about the cosmos, sure, and about biology and the planet and ecosystems and structures and brains, but boy, we know so very little. And that’s totally okay!
One of the greatest lessons in writing about science is to ensure our audience understands there is room to doubt. There is room for uncertainty. In fact, that’s a core tenet of science. No single finding is an absolute truth on its own. We must not sell it in that way, as if we have all the answers now with “breakthroughs” that aren’t breakthroughs