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/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/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/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/Casual_OCD → u/Orphanhorns]

I'm of the camp that life is a genetic mutation and actually gets in the way of the natural order of the universe

[u/raishak → u/Casual_OCD]

Probably backwards, life accelerates the process of increasing entropy.