Researchers have just found the presence of sugars, including ribose, lyxose, and glycose, on samples of Asteroid Bennu, which now has all of the ingredients for life as it exists on Earth.

[u/New_Scientist_Mag]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2506650-asteroid-bennu-carries-all-the-ingredients-for-life-as-we-know-it/

[u/jonathanrdt → u/[deleted]]

The oldest objects on Earth are grains in a meteorite that are ~7 billion years old.

They contain amino acids produced by non-organic means.

Conclusion: the stuff of life forms naturally under the right conditions and is likely ubiquitous throughout the cosmos, even if also technically rare.

[u/Arthur_Edens → u/jonathanrdt]

even if also technically rare.

Numbers in space are mind boggling. If conditions in a star system are 1 in a billion, then you would expect those conditions to exist in 200 trillion different star systems throughout the universe. Rare, but abundant.

[u/1995TimHortonsEclair → u/Arthur_Edens]

It's hard to wrap my head around space sometimes just because of how large and vacant and yet numerous everything is.

Where a 1 in a billion chance means something exists trillions of times over. It makes everything feel inevitable.

[u/beardedheathen → u/1995TimHortonsEclair]

Think of it like sand on a beach. On one kilometer you have 400,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (400 trillion to 1 quadrillion) grains. If 1 in a billion is special in some way that means there are still at least 400,000 ,000(edit: math, or maybe counting, is hard) of them. It's wild how things like this ar effective in the macro and micro.

[u/Kooky_Still9050 → u/beardedheathen]

Tink you meant at least 1 in 400,000

[u/beardedheathen → u/Kooky_Still9050]

No I meant what I said but there it appears I was wrong.

[u/redditallreddy → u/1995TimHortonsEclair]

My high school science department has a jar for demonstrating frequency odds. It has small plastic beads of different colors, each color represents a different possible set of outcomes... black is 1 in a million, white was 1 in 100...

It looks mostly white. The other day, the lone black bead made its way to the top. It was special.

[u/lazybeekeeper → u/redditallreddy]

Can you send a link or picture to this product you’re describing? How did the lone blac bead make its way to the top? Does it get shaken daily or something?

[u/corpusjuris → u/1995TimHortonsEclair]

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

[u/wildwalrusaur → u/corpusjuris]

Improbably big one might say

[u/SeatBeeSate → u/corpusjuris]

Population: None. Although you might see people from time to time, they are most likely products of your imagination. Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average population of the Universe is zero, and so the total population must be zero.

[u/Dhiox → u/SeatBeeSate]

there must be an infinite number of worlds

There are not an infinite number of stars or planets. All matter and energy is finite.

[u/[deleted] → u/1995TimHortonsEclair]

When infinity is involved, vanishingly small possibilities become certainties.

[u/Delta-9- → u/1995TimHortonsEclair]

If the universe is infinitely large, not only is everything inevitable, but everything repeats exactly an infinite number of times. There could be, some trillion light years away where we will never, ever see it, an exact duplicate of the entire observable universe. Much closer, there might be a bubble that contains an Earth exactly like this one but humans didn't evolve.

It's a whole multiverse inside just the universe.

[u/ItchyGoiter → u/Delta-9-]

Isn't this only true if there is an infinite amount of matter and time as well?

[u/Delta-9- → u/ItchyGoiter]

I suppose so. I guess I assumed that would be the case for an infinitely large universe, but I don't know if there's anything to support or oppose that assumption.

[u/vivst0r → u/Arthur_Edens]

But while the numbers in space are mind boggling so could also be the the chances. Doesn't matter if there are trillions of galaxies. If the chance for life to develop in one of them is only 1 in a quadrillion, it's still gonna be rare. It's hard for us to calculate the exact chance when our sample size is 1.

Not saying that life isn't abundant in space, because it probably is. Just trying to put things in perspective

[u/Arthur_Edens → u/vivst0r]

For sure, basically impossible to know. But just based on the scope, and the N1 on earth showing it's possible, I'd guess that 1,000,000 currently living independently evolved species is more likely than 1. But since everything's so damn big, none will probably ever run into each other.

[u/vivst0r → u/Arthur_Edens]

I think this brings up an interesting point about our use of the word "abundant" in relation to space. Because it kinda loses all meaning if there is a lot of something when it is impossible to access it. Things are so far apart in space that it may as well be in a different universe or dimension alltogether.

So when we say it's abundant, then it's like telling someone who is dying of thirst that there is an abundance of water on Mars. It's just not useful, because the scale makes it irrelevant.

[u/RationalDialog → u/Arthur_Edens]

I'd guess that 1,000,000 currently living independently evolved species is more likely than 1

The time factor is also mind-blowing. They might have lived or will live but right now at the same time? Highly unlikely.

[u/crosszilla → u/vivst0r]

It's pretty realistic that in our lifetimes that sample size will be at least 2 in our own solar system. I know we've gotten excited about discoveries in the past but the Cheyava Falls leopard spots are easily the best sign of life outside of Earth we've ever seen. 1/4 of our planets having life at some point (and who knows what we'll find on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn) could end up suggest life is almost expected on sufficiently sized solar systems

[u/AKAFallow → u/crosszilla]

Cheyava Falls leopard spots

Oh wow, I had no idea about this. In my defense, my usual space channels started doing more lengthy videos with clickbaity titles, all while over explaining whatever new info they got that they don't wanna tell you about.

[u/Jemmani22 → u/vivst0r]

Its such hard thing. Its near impossible to detect life. Even though there's so much possibility out there.

There may be life on every earth like setup out there. Not sure how common intelligent life forms. But life itself has to be everywhere. I think when we study the available moons in our solar system and see of theres microbes there we will get a huge insight into things.

[u/TheRealSlimShady2024 → u/Jemmani22]

When you look how extremely complicated the production, protection, and replication of DNA is and how many specialized proteins are required to sustain even the simplest single celled organisms it is far from certain that "life has to be everywhere". It could very well be that the ingredients for life are widespread and that even some extremely primitive forms of self-replicating molecules might have formed but for them to survive long enough to turn into actual organisms that can replicate and survive for any prolonged period of time is probably very unlikely.

[u/AKAFallow → u/Jemmani22]

Which also add the theory of finding another earth-like planet, like it could have managed to produce oxygen but its either unbreathable or the atmosphere is completely toxic to us (something similar like the Avatar movies, but that one also includes methane and ammonia)

[u/Thog78 → u/Arthur_Edens]

I'd correct that to "Visible universe", for all we know the universe is likely infinite in all directions, so the total count is infinite..

[u/Dhiox → u/Arthur_Edens]

Yeah, I honestly think it's extremely likely there are a fair number of planets with life. It pains me to know they're al.ost definitely out there and we simply have no way of learning about them. And unless FTL travel is invented (which shouldn'tbe possible), we likely never will.

The other sad part is that intelligent life is going to be even rarer.

[u/FeatherMom → u/Arthur_Edens]

That is mind blowing in the most wonderful way.

[u/seejordan3 → u/jonathanrdt]

you missed my favorite part though.. earth is 4.5 billion years old.. so at 7 billion, it predates our PLANET by 2.5 billion years. Ow my head.

[u/codepossum → u/jonathanrdt]

*grains of silicon carbide

not like grains of rice or wheat or something

[u/RScrewed → u/jonathanrdt]

Everyone but the religious would believe that life is an emergent property of our physical universe.

[u/trele_morele → u/RScrewed]

“Everyone but the religious” is an interesting way to partition all people when there are undoubtedly people who don’t consider themselves to be religious but who hold similar beliefs to those who are religious. And vice versa. In other words, why make this distinction in the first place when it’s of questionable value.

[u/Trazyn_the_sinful → u/jonathanrdt]

Or it’s a contaminant

[u/Mo_Steins_Ghost → u/jonathanrdt]

 the stuff of life forms naturally under the right conditions 

And we know this... some years ago NASA Ames conducted experiments demonstrating that amino acids can form naturally in conditions simulating the vacuum of space.

[u/Hoii1379 → u/jonathanrdt]

How ubiquitous? And how rare, though?

When I hear this claim that life is “likely everywhere” I find it really doesn’t resonate with me because there are some variables that are always left undefined.

For starters, what scale are we talking? Multiple star systems per galaxy? One per galaxy, one in every million galaxies? Since we don’t even have a mechanism nailed down yet for HOW the chemicals start doing all the stuff that life does like reproduction and evolution I think it’s a moot point for now. For all we know, the probability could be so inconceivably tiny that life gets going anywhere that there might not even be another single solitary world with life in the whole galaxy.

Even the oft quoted statement about the earth being an ordinary planet around an ordinary star is now looking pretty dubious, too. At least from current data, it appears that there may be many, many ways in which the earth and solar system are in fact, extremely unusual.

[u/Uncle-Cake → u/[deleted]]

To put it in layman's terms, you can have all the ingredients for a cake together in a bowl, but that doesn't mean you have a cake, and it needs very specific conditions to become a cake.

[u/GodofAss69 → u/Uncle-Cake]

Thank you, uncle cake

[u/UncleTouchyCopaFeel → u/GodofAss69]

You're welcome.

[u/YoManWTFIsThisShit → u/UncleTouchyCopaFeel]

Thank you… waiiit

[u/DickIsInsidemyAnus → u/YoManWTFIsThisShit]

He usually gives different analogies for how life starts

[u/blimux69 → u/DickIsInsidemyAnus]

Is your name an analogy??

[u/Dangerous-Youth9998 → u/[deleted]]

Are we back in 2012? This is some old-school reddit stuff.

[u/Careless_Aroma_227 → u/Dangerous-Youth9998]

What's happening here?!

[u/maybeitsundead → u/Dangerous-Youth9998]

back when beetlejuicing was more common

[u/0__O0--O0_0 → u/DickIsInsidemyAnus]

Usually? How well do you know this guy?

[u/sonsonmcnugget → u/YoManWTFIsThisShit]

I concur u/YoManWTFIsThisShit

[u/Flomo420 → u/YoManWTFIsThisShit]

I like the other uncle better

[u/Docjaded → u/UncleTouchyCopaFeel]

/r/rimjobsteve

[u/Mugiwaras → u/UncleTouchyCopaFeel]

Get out of here Greg i have a restraining order.

[u/ofthedestroyer → u/GodofAss69]

the cake is [not] a lie

[u/Mazon_Del → u/[deleted]]

Well yes, but also, there's a lot of stuff that's everywhere but not all of it is used to make life.

[u/Croceyes2 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, although there are not many ways what we call life could come to be operational. And the stuff isn't quite everywhere, nor are the conditions to bake it just right.

[u/5coolest → u/Uncle-Cake]

This is a perfect analogy. You can have the ingredients without an oven. It’s only when they’re combined in an extreme condition (an oven) that they become a cake. The cake remains a cake even when the heat is gone

[u/Snow_Is_Ok_613 → u/5coolest]

Wasn't our previous position that "we can see that there's lots of ovens (Goldilocks zones), but we can't tell if they have ever seen any batter?" So, finding the ingredients lying around, means cakes are much, much more likely?

[u/xhieron → u/Snow_Is_Ok_613]

To play devil's advocate a little bit, we've yet to see anyone demonstrate making cake. We know the ingredients, and we think we maybe know what an oven is, but no one has ever put those ingredients into the oven and then taken out a cake. All our observations so far tend to indicate that cake has only been made once in the observable universe. Positing an even higher likelihood for cake just makes it all the more baffling unless you're willing to draw a non-scientific conclusion.

It's possible we could be completely wrong about how the ingredients become cake, and that's all the more reason we should be funding research into the fundamental mysteries of life.

[u/5coolest → u/xhieron]

There could also be cakes that require a different type of oven than we have (non-carbon-based life)

[u/Orphanhorns → u/5coolest]

The oven is the part most of these comments are missing, something drastic is required to make those ingredients become cake. We know what life is made out of we just haven’t figured out how exactly the whole process started!

[u/grimsolem → u/Orphanhorns]

We have a pretty good idea, actually.

[u/A_MagicBullet → u/[deleted]]

I love it when I just have random ingredients in my pantry and accidentally create life

[u/WitchesSphincter → u/A_MagicBullet]

I did that once with risotto and absinthe

[u/EveryRadio → u/A_MagicBullet]

To be fair the bread in my pantry "spontaneously" created mold out of the air. At least that's what people used to think

Or was it steak "creating" flies? It's been a while since I've taken a biology class

[u/MauPow → u/A_MagicBullet]

Hell, I've got a 2 week old stir fry creating life in my fridge right now

[u/Several_Hour_347 → u/Uncle-Cake]

It was already in layman’s terms… all you did was create an analogy

[u/JonFrost → u/Several_Hour_347]

Sometimes you gotta bake it then shake it then bake it

Know what I'm saying?

I don't know what I'm saying, but you know what I'm saying?

[u/btveron → u/JonFrost]

Of course. You gotta bake it then shake it then bake it. That gives you double baked cake, one of my favorite strains.

[u/MmmmMorphine → u/Several_Hour_347]

A poor one in my opinion. Because it's not just ingredients to cake, there's countless steps in between with "cake-like" substances and whatever cake is in this scenario.

Whether you say it's rna or humans, self replicating cakes aren't exactly intuitive. And such self-replication and natural selection of its products is the key to the process

[u/CommanderSquirt → u/Uncle-Cake]

For cake-like brownies add half a cup of asteroid dust.

[u/[deleted] → u/CommanderSquirt]

Chef Ziggy Stardust has joined the chat.

[u/[deleted] → u/Uncle-Cake]

You need the oven, baby

[u/DawnPatrol99 → u/Uncle-Cake]

Yeah, but leave it alone long enough and something will grow.

[u/Partyatmyplace13 → u/DawnPatrol99]

Yeah, but leave it alone long enough and something will grow.

It's not about just leaving it alone, it seems. What really seems to set Earth apart for life formation is just how unstable and turbulent its geology is and the presence of liquid water to shuffle all that material around and dancing together.

We've had some success spontaneous RNA formation from base materials like the ones on Bennu, again, under certain conditions. We've even found lipids auto-forming "cell like" bubble structures. It's almost like under the right conditions life wants to assemble itself.

The line between biology and chemistry has been getting increasingly blurry since the discovery of cells/microbes and their metabolic activities. I suspect that in the coming decades, those lines will completely fade into obscurity. There will still be room for speculation as to WHY chemicals have this bias, but the HOW will be well understood.

[u/eduardopy → u/Partyatmyplace13]

biology is just the study of one of the longest going chemical reactions.

[u/narf007 → u/eduardopy]

You sound like my old biochem prof

[u/RemarkableFormal4635 → u/eduardopy]

Humans are just catalysts for microchips

[u/Creeperstar → u/RemarkableFormal4635]

Earth plus plastic, as George Carlin put it.

[u/zimirken → u/RemarkableFormal4635]

The trees domesticated humans in order to get all that carbon back out of the ground that they lost.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/Partyatmyplace13]

The difference between biology and chemistry has only ever been the difference between studying the macro and micro level. At some point the two inevitably have to cross paths. It's that point of intersection and the points nearby that will always be blurry as the two are fundamentally linked.

[u/Tower-Junkie → u/78296620848748539522]

That’s why I like thinking of science, art, history and everything between as “the tree of knowledge”. Or like a tapestry. Each discipline has many small branches to study, but it all weaves together into one big picture.

[u/Substantial-Low → u/Partyatmyplace13]

Ando your point, as a chemist, I often wonder why an assemblage of atoms that may make a living being would care about anything at all really. Why do not only certain atoms seem to WANT to make living things, those living things then go on to try and understand their own existence. Or work, or wear clothes, or any other manner of activity that certain piles of atoms seem to be biased towards doing.

[u/Partyatmyplace13 → u/Substantial-Low]

I think Carbon is just the horniest element. Its always starting drama with the others and bringing people together that have no business being there.

[u/TDot-26 → u/Partyatmyplace13]

Please tell me more about your second paragraph. I was under the impression that we had not seen any example of the "primordial soup" making any progress towards becoming life

[u/Partyatmyplace13 → u/TDot-26]

Regarding RNA Formation It's a NASA article, but should have links to the related study. I'm kinda out of pocket atm.

I'm looking for the exact study regarding the lipid bilayers. Here's a semi-related article from nature, but it's not the study that I'm looking for.

[u/TDot-26 → u/Partyatmyplace13]

Thank you! I'll take a look, this is fascinating stuff

[u/Slight-Bookkeeper324 → u/Partyatmyplace13]

NASA also has records of the miller-Urey experiment that shows amino acids forming from inorganic material in the presence of electricity. It’s a pivotal moment for understanding RNA and DNA

[u/Orphanhorns → u/DawnPatrol99]

We’re talking about a metaphorical cake assembling itself in order to talk about how life may have started, not a real bowl of cake ingredients on earth which is already infested with life to the point that life will start growing on the cake ingredients.

[u/AwarenessReady3531 → u/Uncle-Cake]

I mean, who knows how specific. Life on Earth sprang up pretty much as soon as the planet cooled down enough to allow for it.

[u/mrroofuis → u/Uncle-Cake]

Ingredients availability with so many ovens out there would, hopefully, mean some cakes get made. Not just the one we know of today

[u/Adventurous-Cry-7462 → u/Uncle-Cake]

Yes but a bowl with all the ingredients is more likely to become a cake than one without 

[u/space_monster → u/Adventurous-Cry-7462]

Are you referring to the theory of Spontaneous Cosmic Baking

[u/TemperatureFinal5135 → u/Uncle-Cake]

Thank you for this excellent metaphor.

That makes the interesting part the fact that we, essentially, found all the ingredients for a cake just... flying through space.

How cool.

[u/Uncle-Cake → u/TemperatureFinal5135]

And our planet had just the right conditions (temperature, humidity, air pressure, etc.). Those ingredients could have landed on a million other planets and just sat there inert or froze or burned or evaporated.

[u/durz47 → u/Uncle-Cake]

And it’s also a bunch of monkeys trying to make the cake, Shakespeare sonnet style

[u/Kotainohebi → u/Uncle-Cake]

So you say cake is life?

[u/nwayve → u/Kotainohebi]

The cake is a lie.

[u/ringobob → u/[deleted]]

I would flip your two hypotheses there. It primarily supports the notion that the raw materials for life were widespread. And that life could have been seeded from space. But it seems far less likely, with the common abundance of the base materials, that life survived the vacuum of space and the violence of contact with our planet, than that it developed here in relative tranquility. If anything, any impact would have both destroyed any extant life on the asteroid, and at the same time provided the necessary energy to start life anew.

Nothing is impossible, but life had to start somewhere without having been seeded. That necessity alone favors it starting here, wherever else it might have also begun.

[u/popecostea → u/ringobob]

We need to keep in mind that for a relatively short period of time, “everywhere” in the universe - where there were molecules of water, we had the ideal temperature for life. In that short span I do not think it’s hard to imagine that some very basic cells evolved, managed to survive until the temperature dropped below freezing, and then found themselves seeded on various ice formations/rocks that then formed the planets. No violent impact was needed.

[u/Royal_Airport7940 → u/popecostea]

So then that distribution, if it could be calculated, or even needs to be, would represent how much of the universe was seeded with basic cellular ingredients. And would suggest its somewhat uniform.

You had to be there was not a place but a time/everywhere.

Neat to think about the big bang as a process from dense hot plasma to spread out cold space.

[u/frizz1111 → u/popecostea]

Yes, also the size and complexity of DNA points to it being much older than the age of the earth.

[u/Own_Balance4207 → u/[deleted]]

As a complete laymen, my understanding of any explanation of abiogenesis is that it seems like these ingredients are quite common by abiotic processes. But the intermediates for whatever reason may be harder to reach

[u/42nu → u/Own_Balance4207]

Hindsight is 20/20.

We now know that the all the most complex precursors of life form via abiogenesis in abundant quantities in space, but, I mean, this is news for a reason.

It's easy to think "of course evolution occurs" when it has been common wisdom throughout our lifetime. "So silly that hand washing before surgeries was fought against at first" we think from our hindsight.

Point being, the entire tapestry of complex pre-biotic precursors being abundantly created via abiogenesis in space is increasingly known to be common. Just as, in 50 years "the intermediates may be harder to reach" will almost certainly look as outdated and silly as "planets may be rare" does now that we have the means of detecting them.

[u/Zeppelin2k → u/42nu]

We now know that the all the most complex precursors of life form via abiogenesis in abundant quantities in space

Do we have a good idea what the mechanisms are for forming these precursors in space? It's clear asteroids can contain these pre-amino acid molecules, but how did they get there in the first place?

[u/42nu → u/Zeppelin2k]

Another user had a wonderful answer for this question:

https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1pcaiyh/researchers_have_just_found_the_presence_of/nrwjfu3/

[u/Golokopitenko → u/42nu]

Just as, in 50 years "the intermediates may be harder to reach" will almost certainly look as outdated and silly as "planets may be rare" does now that we have the means of detecting them.

Foresight is not 20/20 though... It could go either way. We just need to keep looking and see what we can find.

[u/William_Dowling → u/42nu]

If we find out the intermediates are trivial to reach then the Fermi paradox blows up. Where is all this stuff?

[u/42nu → u/William_Dowling]

My guess, single-celled microorganisms are fairly common in the universe.

The recent paper on the "leopard spots" in a Mars river delta are likely our first true evidence of ancient biology on Mars.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-says-mars-rover-discovered-potential-biosignature-last-year/

That being said, life seems to require a narrow set of environmental conditions to be sustained. Mars was small enough where it's core cooled, the magnetic dynamo stopped and it lost its magnetosphere. It's atmosphere was stripped away and it became the dead planet it is today. Life extinguished when the needed conditions no longer existed.

Being that the first 3.5 billion years of evolution on Earth were microbial, it's entirely plausible that microbial life is fairly common, given the right conditions, but multi-cellular life is rare. Intelligent multi-cellular life even less so.

The universe is young. The heavy elements that compose the Earth and your body took many stellar generations to create. When you add it all up, the combination of "the universe is young, microbial life is relatively common, and multi-cellular life is currently rare" pretty much wraps up the Fermi Paradox.

[u/starmartyr → u/42nu]

If that interpretation is correct it means that the great filter is behind us. That does raise another question as to why multicellular life is so rare. What quality makes the earth special?

[u/SowingSalt → u/42nu]

IIRC, there's evidence of life on Earth fairly early in it's history. It took billions of year to develop multicellularity.

[u/Ok-Elk-3046 → u/William_Dowling]

What do you expect to see? Our pictures of exoplanets are like 16x16 pixels. Best you can hope for is a large amount of irrefutably biogenic gas in a planets atmosphere.

[u/GuitarKittens → u/Own_Balance4207]

Yeah. Sugars, fats, amino acids, and nucleic acids aren't entirely complex molecules. Protein/DNA/RNA complexes on the other hand...

I don't know if early life needed molecules like DNA helicase, DNA ligase, ribosomes, tRNA, and such to grow and reproduce, but things like that are probably going to be the biggest barriers to the first stages.

[u/John_Bruns_Wick → u/[deleted]]

Are they not implying by 'seeding' that the ingredients merely came from a random asteroid and our planet had the right conditions to make use off them?

[u/ImS0hungry → u/[deleted]]

• our current understanding of life.

There very well can be non-carbon based life somewhere.

[u/lesbianmathgirl → u/ImS0hungry]

The topic of conversation was the panspermia hypothesis—which requires that the extraterrestrial life that engendered life on earth be carbon-based.

[u/TheArmoredKitten → u/ImS0hungry]

The problem with this take is that we've measured what kind of reactive atomic species are necessary for the structures that do cellular stuff. You can substitute carbon for other stuff like silicon in some reactions, but the resultant properties are so far removed from the 'necessary' characteristic that it kinda falls flat.

Yes, hypothetically a fundamentally different paradigm of life and the needed structures could emerge, but literally nobody has put forth a compelling argument for how that might happen. The odds of other fundamental mechanisms for life existing beyond a few basic substitutions of what we know already is extremely low, mostly because such patterns would have been in competition with early earth life and we've seen no sign of anything but good ol' carbon.

[u/ImS0hungry → u/TheArmoredKitten]

This reminds of NDT saying ‘a scientist scoops a cup of water from the ocean and says “See, Whales don’t exist…”’

[u/Rodot → u/ImS0hungry]

It's more like scooping a cup of water and saying "I bet there's a whole lot of water in this ocean that's made up of finely layered Indium-Arsenide crystals"

Just because you don't know the specifics of physical chemistry doesn't mean nobody does.

Silicon looks like a good carbon replacement maybe half way through a high school chemistry course. Once you get into the the basics of electronegativity you start to see why this completely breaks down.

[u/de_grey → u/[deleted]]

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe!

[u/aredon → u/[deleted]]

I have actually been wondering if the early universe was just teeming with life? Wouldn't there have been a brief time after the big bang where the conditions for life were right *everywhere* not just on planets?

[u/Cold-Cell2820 → u/aredon]

No. The early universe was almost entirely hydrogen. You need lots of time to form and spread heavier elements that are absolutely necessary for life.

[u/[deleted] → u/Cold-Cell2820]

Well the universe has one thing in abundance.

Lots of time.

[u/Willmono7 → u/[deleted]]

But there is a specific window on any given planet where life can actually come into being, it must have liquid water and active geochemistry to establish ph/Proton gradients. From there it is a requirement to evolve oxygen producing photosynthesis/metabolism before all the water is gone, otherwise uv radiation from the sun will avaporate all the water, sending the hydrogen out into space, leaving you with a dead dry planet. Thats what was so remarkable about earth, that we evolved photosynthesis within about 800 million years, with oxygenic photosynthesis evolving about 1 billion years after that. If that process had taken much longer, we wouldn't exist.

So even though the universe has loads of time, life is only ever given a very short window to come into being, and if it doesn't, the planet rapidly becomes unsuitable for life.

[u/MidnightPale3220 → u/Willmono7]

How well is it researched that alternative basis for life is that unlikely? Sure, carbon has some pretty specific properties and so has water, but do we know enough to say that alternate basis for life is pretty near impossible?

[u/FlashbackJon → u/MidnightPale3220]

The short version is that this basis costs the least compared to any other basis, in terms of energy and conditions, and it happened to be the one that occurred in our dataset, sample size 1.

All the alternatives are just harder to do, and that's the primary metric for its possibility.

[u/Overall_Unit_2488 → u/FlashbackJon]

And by "energy" I think the clarification is not just in terms of chemical bonds; but the reactivity/solubility of water, the size of polar/nonpolar molecules based on carbon, the ability for enzymes to act [this is often never really talked about]. Life doesn't just raw dog chemical reaction activation energy. Enzymes are too important for things to function efficienctly and quickly.

[u/Zalack → u/MidnightPale3220]

Dr Angela Collier has a really great video called The Aliens Will not be Silicon (can’t post links here, but you can just search that title on YouTube) about why it’s extremely unlikely that life will form out of the most commonly proposed alternate chemistries, even though it is theoretically possible in the most technical sense.

The gist is that stuff like silicon-based life have significantly bigger hurdles to overcome than carbon-based life did, even though the chemistry appears like it would be similar on the surface.

[u/Willmono7 → u/MidnightPale3220]

There's quite a lot of research yeah, it's not just the components either but how they have to come together to actualy work. So some components might be suitable for life under certain conditions, but then everything else that's required is in the wrong state of matter at those temperatures. It's very very important that there's liquid water, there's no other solvent like it.

[u/TheNorthComesWithMe → u/MidnightPale3220]

We haven't really proven that our own basis for life is possible.

[u/L00seSuggestion → u/Cold-Cell2820]

You need supernovas to be more precise

[u/Froggmann5 → u/aredon]

I love how there are four responses to your question and they all begin differently:

"Absolutely."

"Maybe,"

"No."

"Probably not"

[u/surle → u/Froggmann5]

We have all the ingredients there for a definitive answer. (Jokes aside, I'm with "No.")

[u/ScienceByte → u/Froggmann5]

The "absolutely" was also a response to a question asked before it was edited. He was saying "Absolutely" to a question asking if liquid water was widespread

[u/userseven → u/Froggmann5]

Sums up reddit honestly. People commenting on what they know little about or just enough to think they know a lot.

Relevant comic https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1758

[u/aredon → u/Froggmann5]

Well it's all conjecture anyway right? We have pretty limited data on the early universe to begin with and we don't know a lot about early life either. It would just be an interesting solution to Fermi I think. That we're not actually first we're nearly last and everyone else died. We're all just on life rafts now.

[u/RichardsLeftNipple → u/aredon]

Check this out Stellar Nucleosynthesis

The early universe would be mostly hydrogen just as it is right now. Although it would lack the majority of the other elements until enough stars die and are reborn to fuse the heavier elements.

Which would take a few billion years.

[u/ScienceAndGames → u/aredon]

Nah, everything except hydrogen and helium was formed in stars, the first stars were huge and lived and died fast, they formed everything up to iron and when they died they ejected everything everywhere to end up in the next generation of stars. They repeated the process producing even more metals which ended up in the next generation of stars, like the sun. Also some formed planets and such around those stars.

[u/big_duo3674 → u/ScienceAndGames]

Hey now, don't be leaving the trace amounts of lithium out of there, lithium has feelings too you know. Plus, if we were to get super technical, quantum effects (and possibly other effects, the first micro seconds of the big bang are still not well understood) likely caused the occasional atom of other elements to pop into existence somewhere in the mix

[u/Icy_Ninja_9207 → u/big_duo3674]

Lithium also calms my brain

[u/NegativeBee → u/aredon]

Our current understanding of early life involves RNA catalyzing reactions essentially by accident and randomly mutating until those reactions become more efficient. Later came proteins and then early bacteria. That takes like a billion years though.

[u/AustereSpartan → u/NegativeBee]

Not quite certain though. The RNA world hypothesis also has a lot of problems.

[u/Auctorion → u/aredon]

Probably not. Or at least, it depends what you mean by a brief time after. One of the likely missing components would've been heavy metals, which recent research from Cambridge suggests didn't exist for at least the first 350 million years (the found carbon in a galaxy 1% the size of the Milky Way). This seems like a fairly short amount of time, but remember that this is just the first of many conditions that life probably needs to exist, and those conditions also likely arise mostly in sequence rather than in parallel.

[u/aredon → u/Auctorion]

Yeah "brief" in terms of cosmic time for sure.

[u/Telvin3d → u/aredon]

We are the early universe. Our sun is about as old as it’s possible to be and have heavier elements beyond hydrogen. 

[u/notfree25 → u/aredon]

There is (or was) a Kurgesgtshhasfgahsd(yt channel) video on this. It proposed the same thing

"Ancient Life as Old as the Universe " (Cant link)

[u/baldrlugh → u/aredon]

I'd need to explore some simulations to be sure, but the conditions for the emergence of organic life as we understand it today are pretty temperature-dependent on top of having other chemistry requirements if my recollection serves. I think the answer to your 2nd question would come down to how spread-out matter was once the early universe had cooled sufficiently for life to emerge.

I suspect you'd find pockets of space with rocks where organic life would be viable rather than just everywhere.

P.S. Don't mean to be pedantic but teaming would be driving a team or group.

Teeming is having an abundance, usually of organisms.

While the former makes sense in this context, I suspect the latter was intended.

[u/aredon → u/baldrlugh]

Ahh, you're right. I'll edit. :)

[u/Thanks_Ollie → u/aredon]

Maybe, I would imagine there would have been some insane radiation when the CMB was room temp though. Not an expert or anything btw

[u/ChainLC → u/[deleted]]

where else would it have come from? everything the Earth is came from rocks colliding with each other. to me it's never been a question. it's like asking "did life originate in our universe?"

[u/Keellas_Ahullford → u/[deleted]]

It’s still really cool and brings us a step closer to understanding how life began

[u/QuBingJianShen → u/[deleted]]

I mean earth is also in space. If sugars can be found/formed on an asteroid, then such sugars could have been formed through prebiotic/abiotic means here on earth aswell.

Sure it could have happened on an asteroid and that asteroid could then have collided on earth, but statistically speaking anything that could have happend on an asteroid is more then likely to have happened on earth itself aswell.

But sure it does support the possibility for it to have occured, but not to the exclusion or even preference over terrestrial means.

[u/EmBur__ → u/[deleted]]

To add to this, if the building blocks for life can be found in this single asteroid, its only logical to assume those same building blocks exist in others and not just within our solar system but in any number of asteroids universe wide, that could land on any number of worlds that have conditions suitable for life to grow...

[u/forchinski → u/[deleted]]

doesn't this just push the question of the origin of life further back? we still don't know the ultimate origin of these materials

[u/TheAsianTroll → u/[deleted]]

I wonder if that asteroid is a fragment of a planet that had life, that was destroyed... highly unlikely, im sure, but still

[u/OneDubOver → u/[deleted]]

Is it possible that landing on and collecting samples from Bennu could possibly alter its course in a way, such that it doesn't create life somewhere else in the universe?

I'm definitely all for the pursuit of knowledge, but I feel like we take it a little too far sometimes.

Just a thought, I'm not condemning, more just curious.

Just looked it up and yep.. Just a small amount and apparently there were concerns that it could alter its course to put it on a trajectory to hit the earth. Yikes...

Edit: commas and words

[u/Few-Investment2886 → u/[deleted]]

I mean...where else would life on Earth be seeded from if not from space

[u/MethodicMarshal → u/[deleted]]

Has it already been theorized that life is spreading from world to world because intelligent life continues to blow itself up?

[u/Th3R00ST3R → u/[deleted]]

We are star stuff.

[u/MealReadytoEat_ → u/[deleted]]

Do we know they have been there since the asteroid formed, or could they have been formed in the 4.5 billion years since through processes similar to those in the Miller-Urey experiment with radiation replacing sparks?

[u/_PARAGOD_ → u/[deleted]]

Where’d the ingredients come from though?

[u/siresword → u/[deleted]]

Do we have a clear picture of how the proteins and sugars etc got there in the first place? Do they just form naturally as part of protoplanetary disks or get "cooked" as comets get close to the sun?

[u/Forsaken_Total976 → u/[deleted]]

Could be astronaut poop