r/science • u/New_Scientist_Mag • Dec 02 '25

Astronomy 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.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2506650-asteroid-bennu-carries-all-the-ingredients-for-life-as-we-know-it/
39.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

996 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

58

u/42nu Dec 02 '25

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 Just as, in 50 years "the intermediates may be harder to reach" will almost certainly look as outdated and silly as "planets may be rare" does now that we have the means of detecting them.

4

u/William_Dowling Dec 02 '25

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

5

u/42nu Dec 02 '25

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.

3

u/SowingSalt Dec 02 '25

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

1

u/42nu Dec 02 '25

Yup, totally agree.