Many of us are aghast at the fortune in tax money that’s been directed by USAID to projects that are either totally absurd or nakedly ideological. A parody video on X has a gal grieving over her canceled program, spending $72 million dollars to study whether carrier pigeons in Madagascar can distinguish name brand from generic Doritos — “and I was literally on the verge of a breakthrough!” The dead-pan parody is not far off from the reality, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is looking into it.

They should also take a look at NASA, some of whose spending, which makes $72 million look like peanuts (or Doritos), is being cheered on for frankly ideological reasons. I noted here the other day the probe to the asteroid Bennu that, for under a billion dollars brought back a bit of space dust with some amino acids in it. New York Times science reporter Carl Zimmer drew the expected conclusion: the “NASA spacecraft holds hints that our planet may not be so special.”

How much space spending goes to disproving the specialness of life on Earth? Clearly, many people are animated by axe-grinding against the thesis of our Privileged Planet. If none of them work for NASA, I’d be surprised. 

Two Divergent Agendas

In exploring the solar system, we can distinguish programs with two divergent agendas. Some are aimed at planting the human flag on distant bodies — the moon, or Mars. Those are a tribute to human exceptionalism, and, I would say as a taxpayer, healthy.

Others are directed at defeating the idea of our exceptional status in the cosmos: a desperate search for life elsewhere to show there’s nothing special about our planet or about terrestrial life. Another writer in the Times, science historian Claire Isabel Webb, lays this out with admirable candor, demanding, “Can We Please Just Find the Aliens Already?”

She sees triumphant human exploration as yesterday’s news. Instead, “After all these decades, we’re witnessing missions that are more intensely devoted to investigating alien — not human — habitability.” She concludes, “Journeys to alien worlds are crucial if we’re to solve the profound and abiding mystery of the origin of life and learn whether we’re alone. That, to me, sounds like a much more worthy endeavor of our energies [sic] than our longstanding treatment of space as a void waiting to be conquered.”

She gives several promising examples of worthwhile projects, and they are pricy. There is NASA’s Europa Clipper, headed for Jupiter’s moon, “to investigate Europa’s potential to harbor life. Its findings may help confirm, as some would expect, that all life in the universe followed a shared evolutionary pathway.” Price tag: $5.2 billion.

Anything Else?

Writes Webb, “The Europa Clipper mission represents a sea change for NASA. After all these decades, we’re witnessing missions that are more intensely devoted to investigating alien — not human — habitability,” whether in ice-covered oceans or toxic clouds. There is NASA’s planned Dragonfly probe to another moon, Saturn’s Titan. Cost: $3.3 billion. There are two missions to Venus, VERITAS and DAVINCI. According to Wikipedia, “Each mission will get approximately US$500 million in funding.” This is adding up. Anything else? Yes:

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a subsurface ocean that may be habitable by life of some sort. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is also a worthy candidate. The presence of water on Ceres, the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, raises thin hopes that life could have arisen there.

These are all in the offing, but the prices are again high. The Enceladus Orbilander, for example, is estimated at $4.9 billion, 

The hopes for the habitability of any of these are indeed thin, as we’ve reported about Enceladus (here), Europa (here, here), and Titan (here). Webb admits about Europa, “Given how inaccessible the ocean is, Clipper is unlikely to find definitive proof of alien life. (Though never say never.)”

Worth the Cost?

It’s not that nothing of interest would come from these missions. Of course, their results promise to be fascinating. But worth the cost? That’s another question, and not one to be decided by scientists. It’s disturbing that the motivation appears to be not human triumph over nature but instead, putting us in our place, which is not a high or special one. Arguably it would be money better spent, those billions of dollars, to ennoble human beings rather than to degrade us. 

Intelligent design, I should add, can accommodate a cosmos with or without life elsewhere. But for the materialist, atheist evolutionary viewpoint to be valid, life must be easy to evolve, so aliens MUST be out there somewhere. “Give them to us,” the missions and their cheerleaders seem to be saying, “please!”