Harold Connolly Jr.

100%.

Okay.

Okay, it was my chance to have fun at you.

Well, there's one little catch to that in the sense of geology, in that the oldest rocks we have on Earth are from four to about 4.4 billion years, which is one of many reasons we study Bennu samples, Rugu samples, and meteorites.

Because, in part, the Earth is dynamic, it's active, it's moving, the surface is constantly moving, but also the very few tens of millions of years of the Earth's existence, the surface was really molten.

before the crust formed.

And that's what a lot of the scientific hypotheses hit at, that it was cooked too much for these kinds of compounds to survive on Earth.

Now, maybe inside is another issue, and maybe the meteorites coming down and seeding after the cooling happened, either on Earth or on Mars, is much more probable now than it was, I think, before we flew both missions.

And in fact, we have sugar too now.

We have RNA triggers now.

That's a really big deal too.

Well, that's what we're learning from the study of Anu samples and Rugu samples.

And, you know, I can't give you an answer yes or no, but looking like a lot of it, a lot of the ingredients, yes, they can happen abionically, at least the ingredients for life.

What happens after life comes about, how it changes that is another issue.

But that is where we're going right now.

Yeah, I think that's, and that's also, I think to bring it back a little bit to Ben, I think that's why it's also so important that we know the context of what we're analyzing and understand very clearly what kind of geologic processes occurred to that particular rock or rocks.

Because organic chemists, for example, they don't know geology.

They don't need to know the geology.

But we geologists have been very poor over the course of time at explaining what we mean when we say things are geologically processed.

And it's much more complicated than what often is interpreted either by the organic chemist, biologist, or even the general public.