This their way is their folly... Psalm 39:14
"The NASA Astrobiology Institute
was born in 1998 after the Mars 
meteorite scandal. It has a budget of
$65 million per year.
The goal of the new scheme was to attract as many
dreamers in the public as possible who would vote for more NASA funding.
NASA never had to pay interest on these investments, because it was all
based on hope and imagination of possibilities.
It was a giant Ponzi
scheme, no better than the FTX scandal where Sam Bankman-Fried teased
ordinary people to put their savings into his crypto exchange,
except NASA’s scheme is worse. Investing in SBF’s scheme was voluntary,
but the US government confiscates millions of citizens’ tax dollars by
force and gives it to NASA for astrobiological projects with no
accountability.
Astrobiologists can look busy and work on irrelevant
projects but 
never have to produce the goods: evidence for
extraterrestrial life..... how do they gauge the success of astrobiology or origin-of-life
projects? It’s an open-ended dream with no end game except for actually
finding life that might have “emerged” by materialistic processes.
If
there is no life beyond earth, they could keep the scheme going forever,
never having to deliver their ROI, until they have looked under every
rock on Mars and explored every quadrant of every presumed ocean under
the crust of icy moons like Europa and Enceladus.
Most citizens who had
invested their trust in NASA’s tease will be long dead before the
schemers have to concede the probable truth: there is no other life in
our solar system.
Q: What then?
A: The scammers can just carry on the search
among thousands of exoplanets being discovered.
There is hope for a collapse of this Ponzi scheme. NASA tried it before
with SETI. Carl Sagan, the 1980s-era scam artist, teased the public with
his Cosmos series, dreaming that “there might be a million
planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone that are at this moment inhabited
by other intelligent beings.” (Note to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the scheme’s
successor: his “extraordinary claim” still lacks “extraordinary
evidence.”)
After scrutiny by Congress, especially William Proxmire’s
“Golden Fleece” award given to the SETI pushers, NASA dropped SETI and the alien hunters had to raise their own money.
Charles Darwin was the face that launched a thousand spaceships, when he teased that life might have emerged in a “warm little pond.” CEH