David Grinspoon

And they found sugars now, too.

And that's all the basic stuff you need for life.

A couple of different sugars.

I'm not remembering which ones.

I think ribose was one of them.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So there's a couple of really amazing implications.

One is, I mean, remember this asteroid Bennu was just kind of chosen because, as Neil said, it's coming close to Earth, but it was also convenient to get to.

So there's nothing about it that's different from like thousands of other carbonaceous, primitive, carbon-rich asteroids out there.

But it happens to be full of the stuff of life.

What this implies is that when the planets were young, they were all being sprinkled with the ingredients for life, not just earth, but all of them were being plastered with this stuff that's sort of like the kit, you know, the recipe, just add water, you know?

Gotcha.

And it implies not just our own solar system, but probably elsewhere.

I mean, again, you know, we have to extrapolate, but there's nothing that we know about the chemistry of our asteroid belt that's probably different from that around other stars.

And so it implies that the stuff of life is all over young planets in the universe when they've just formed.

But the other weird thing is you can ask, so why didn't it progress to life?

in this asteroid.

Why don't you have proteins and RNA?

You have the kit, but the kit has not been assembled there.