Intelligent Life On Earth?

On Monday a NASA press release promised a news conference to talk about "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The wording of the release made a lot of news outlets run stories speculating about actually finding life on another planet. Officially, the news was supposed to be embargoed until the 11 a.m. PST Thursday press conference, but The Sun, in the UK, broke the embargo early on Wednesday with a story titled NASA researchers find life in poisonous arsenic lake in USA. This lake is Mono Lake, in California, near Yosemite National Park, and the finding about arsenate-reducing bacteria is what the press conference is supposed to be about.

Hooray for overhyping. NASA used to do really cool stuff that was naturally exciting, even to laypeople. Now they are involved in what the masses thing of as boring. Although very important basic research, the PR folks feel the need to hype it up to get the Idiocracy excited. It helps keep the funding and grants flowing, at least. Even sober and conservative news outlets like The Times of London just want to get to the "good stuff" -- is there life on other planets?

I don't personally think this this kind of work is boring, but public interest in science is falling. I really don't support over-dramatizing things to get interest from the Idiocracy, because such interest has a limited attention span and only reinforces the dysfunctional relationship between the media, the public, and researchers.

If journalists were educated the way ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman was, we'd have meaningful communications of science concepts to the public, but because the standards are so much lower now, every story has the gee-whiz angle hyped, often with egregious errors in fact. This sort of dynamic does nothing to educate laypeople, and for the NASA PR office to play into it serves to bury stories of real advancements among junk like the whole "missile launch" video business.

The punch line? This isn't even really new stuff. This August 2008 article from Chemistry World titled Arsenic-loving bacteria rewrite photosynthesis rules, says pretty much what the Sun article said, although more technically.  Maybe the findings to be announced have some important but technical detail that the mainstream non-scientific press hasn't picked up on, but NASA's PR machine is still in error for pushing the ET angle so prominently.