Not the first time they found amino acids on a asteroid, but great news nonetheless. For example the Murchison Meteorite had over 70 different aminoacids found on it while parts of the meteorite being dated as old as 7b years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite#Nucleobase...
Finding amino acids on an asteroid confirms something we already knew. They can be available without showing evidence of life.
The real mystery thus remains life itself. The fact that on Earth it used amino acids to express itself doesn't mean that it is necessarily limited to that single choice. It also doesn't mean that the same process would repeat in a different world, even if all the preconditions were met, i.e. the necessary for the presence of life as we can recognize it.
For all our understanding of (earthly) biology, and the tools at our disposal that we use to decide that something is alive, we still don't really know what life is, or how it begins. On another world it might as well kickstart the magic with a different medium than amino acids (e.g. more crystalline structures, some energy forms such as light or electricity, etc), with entirely different rules of replication and sustenance. It would probably make life look different to us, potentially not recognizable or even detectable.
Heck, it could happen right here, under our nose and we'd be none the wiser.
> "Proving amino acids exist in the subsurface of asteroids increases the likelihood that the compounds arrived on Earth from space," he said.
Are we sure it doesn't just mean the compounds were already sitting on Earth for the same reason they're sitting on the asteroid? I guess maybe if literally all of them were cooked to death in the Hadean and had to be refreshed from space, but then how do they avoid being cooked to death in asteroid impacts?
We again return to the rabbit hole that is the Fermi Paradox [1]. In short: there are so many stars and planets and we've had billions of years. Why aren't ther emore signs of technological life?
A core idea of this is that there are various filters that separate a new planet from one hosting spacefaring life. There are lot of these filters proposed. One category is the Great Filter. These are where very few lifeforms are expected to pass.
So what we're talking about here is an early filter where a planet forms in a relatively stable and suitable star system and single cellular life forms. Based on our own understanding of biochemistry, that pretty much requires amino acids. Now there might be other forms of life out there but they're all theoretical. We have one which is real (ie ours).
We've had a lot of experimentals that show that amino acids can form in deep space on icy bodies. What we have here is direct evidence from an essentially random asteroid that it has amino acids on it. We can and will speculate as to the origins of these. Did they form on the asteroid? Elsewhere? When?
You can't obviously draw too many conclusions from a single data point but to suggest we got extremely lucky to find the a super rare asteroid with amino acids on it stretches incredulity.
So the conditions that lead to life similar to ours forming being relatively common only gets stronger. This is similar to the number of expoplanets we've found. We've shown that planetary systems are exceedingly common, which was something we could only speculate about a mere 40 years ago.
More planets, more conditions for life forming. This means more species are likely getting filtered further down the chain.
My intuition is that life was formed using amino acids because they are common substances that occur naturally where liquid water is around.
Not because they have any unique lifeforming property.
It's this another point in favor of the panspermia hypothesis?
Can anyone point me in the right direction of a paper that talks more about this?
So life beyond Mars confirmed then?
Poor Stanley Tweedle
I just have to say it ... Hayabusa is such a cool name ... just is.
Hypothetical question:
Let's assume for a while that amino acids are everywhere in the solar system or galaxy (if not universe). Let's also assume that there are many earth-like planets.
If we found alien life on another earth-like planet, could it be possible that it too would have independently-evolved DNA? Not just DNA-like substances, but chemically identical DNA?
I guess I am wondering was DNA such an incredible fluke here on earth that we'll never see it again, or is it "the logical conclusion" for a bunch of similar amino acids in very similar environments? IIRC DNA is a chemically stable structure etc