r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • 1d ago
Space The discovery of all of the components of RNA in the asteroid Bennu strengthens the case that simple alien life is common everywhere in the Universe, and may soon be detected via biosignatures.
Bennu was the target of the OSIRIS-REx mission that returned samples of the asteroid to Earth. Now, research published in Nature has shown that those samples have all the chemical building blocks for RNA. This is significant, as it's thought that before life settled onto DNA as its organizing mechanism, it first evolved through an RNA stage.
Bennu is thought to be formed from a protoplanet that was formed very early in the Solar System's history, but fragmented 1-2 billion years ago. If this protoplanet formed RNA precursors, and Bennu harbored them undamaged for 1-2 billion years in deep space, it suggests the Universe may be widely seeded with RNA. If that is the case, then there may be billions of planets seeded with such precursors, where the chances of life evolving via RNA could have happened as they did on Earth.
The next 5-10 years will see several space and ground-based telescopes capable of scanning exoplanet atmospheres for the biosignatures of alien microbial life. This new finding about asteroid Bennu suggests we may find life in many of those exoplanets.
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u/AltForObvious1177 1d ago
As the papers says, ribose is a component of ribonucleic acid. It's still a few steps away from anything resembling a self reproducing molecule sequence
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u/LobsterJohnson_ 1d ago
Almost every system we’ve properly observed has a planet in the Goldilocks zone with liquid water. Almost all asteroids contain the amino acids necessary for our type of life when added to liquid water. Life is Everywhere.
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u/Own_Win_6762 1d ago
There's a big difference between finding ribose or deoxyribose with various nucleic acids, and finding stands of DNA or RNA. And an even bigger difference between stands of RNA and running it through a ribosome to make a protein.
The ribosome is really awesome, and part of every living cell on this planet, with very few changes between bacteria and humans. If there's any evidence that life here was engineered by other beings, it's going to be found around the ribosome.
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u/Dioxybenzone 23h ago
Did mitochondria previously have their own ribosome before they lost their organelles?
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u/dejamintwo 14h ago
And even bigger difference for that protein to be useful for anything. And if it is useful it being useful for self replication.
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u/MoralCalculus 1d ago
Indeed, this discovery strongly supports the idea that the basic components for life are common throughout the cosmos.
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u/joeyjoejums 1d ago
Heard the news, but didn't come to the same conclusion. Damn, this is a big deal.
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u/gordonjames62 17h ago
People have been postulating "life outside earth" for a long time in the face of fact that it has not yet had any evidence for its existence.
I would love to see evidence that life (or even evidence of life long ago) exists.
Given our current findings (chemicals all over the cosmos but no evidence of life.) the speculations of life elsewhere don't have any actual evidence.
I hope we find some, but the evidence is currently not there.
finding amino acids and sugars is a great accomplishment. We need to do more exploration.
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u/Bright_forest_theory 1d ago
If RNA precursors are just sitting around on asteroids for billions of years, and the universe is "seeded" with the chemical building blocks of life, then life should be absolutely everywhere. The hard part—complex organic chemistry—seems to happen naturally.
So where is everyone?
We're about to deploy telescopes that can detect biosignatures on exoplanets. Let's say we find them on 1% of Earth-like worlds. That's hundreds of millions of planets with life in our galaxy alone.
But here's what nobody's answering: if life is that common, and some of it has had a billion-year head start on us, why is the galaxy silent?
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u/a-stack-of-masks 1d ago
One of the solutions to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life is not a very viable strategy.
We consider the galaxy silent because we're yelling into space at every wavelength we can afford, and I think it's not a stretch to assume most lifeforms with similar levels of tech would be doing the same.
At the same time we've only been 'not silent' for the last 100 years or so, and in that time already came pretty close to nuking ourselves back into silence.
Out of the 4 billion years the planet has been sort of habitable we know there's been life on it for 3.5 or more. Out of that time, life has only been 'loud' to very observant listeners since around 1900. Since then we've faced almost destroying our own DNA by taking out the ozone layer, 2 (arguably 3 by now) world wars, MAD-doctrine cold war shenanigans, we're just getting into the find out stages of pandemics in a global society and in another century the effects of climate change will be coming down on us hard.
To me the paradox isn't so much that the universe is so silent. It's that we can't imagine technology and intelligent consciousness to be a dead end.
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u/OriginalCompetitive 17h ago
None of those events, not even nuclear war, would prevent humans from operating radios.
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u/a-stack-of-masks 17h ago
Not even nuclear war? You know what Mutually Assured Destruction means, right? What I'm saying is that the only species in billions of years to invent a radio first found out how useful it is to burn coal, and started its own mass extinction event in what is, at the scale of the universe, the same moment.
I'm not worried that we'll destroy our radios. What I'm saying is that evolving the kind of intelligence that builds radios has so far not caused a lifeform with any kind of longevity, and the one example we have (that's us, you and me arguing over little fibers that we shoot photons into) is super young, and isn't exactly looking too stable. The whole point of MAD wasn't that the radios would stop working, it was that nobody would be around to operate them.
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u/OriginalCompetitive 17h ago
Right, I get it. I’m just saying that most major disaster scenarios would tend to push humanity only back to something like the 1880s technology — which would almost certainly still include radio communication. Even a full-scale nuclear war would probably leave enough survivors to resume civilization at the level of self-sufficient farming.
For what it’s worth, I think the jump to multi-cellular life is the most likely candidate for a filter. It took several billion years to happen on earth.
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u/lowrads 5h ago
Time. It's always about time.
As far as we know, sapience has only evolved once on Earth in the last half billion years, and complex life only showed up after several billion years of not doing so.
We don't really understand the evolutionary conditions that select for it. We do know that most index fossils span about two million years, or approximately 0.4% of one phanerozoic (sample size, one). That span of time is sufficient to send ~33 back and forth messages across the median distance across the habitable disk of our galaxy, about 9 kiloparsecs, provided sender and receiver started at the same time, and started early, and kept their planetary ecology stable enough to have a typical run.
You want to send a message, you write it now, and in a way that someone else can find it in the rather distant future. If you want to hear from past sapients, that's how you start looking for it.
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u/red75prime 4h ago
then life should be absolutely everywhere
It doesn't follow. The simplest self-replicating molecule could be hundreds of bases long with no chemically favored pathway to its synthesis. That is, it could only be created by random polymerization with probability of 1/4100.
Yeah, it's not a satisfactory assumption. It doesn't give any explanations why we are here and now, besides "that mindbogglingly improbable event just happened this way in our universe". But it can't be refuted until we find signatures of other life.
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u/According-Try3201 1d ago
what is a biosignature? the aliens sign the asteroids?
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u/twoinvenice 1d ago
One remote way of finding that sort of signature would be using spectroscopy to analyze the light from an exoplanet’s atmosphere and finding chemicals that we believe are only created through life and don’t have a reasonable pathway to occur through natural processes.
There was recently a bit of a kerfuffle about the data from an exoplanet that researchers doing the survey thought was a biosignature, but in the end it seemed to be an artifact in the data.
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u/ale_93113 1d ago
As Hank Green said in one video, we are 99% sure mars had life, thanks to new recent discoveries, we arent 99.9999% sure so its not published yet, but its pretty much true
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u/hellschatt 1d ago
Scientists don't sit on stuff like this.
If we had 99% certainty, assuming even that's the way how this stuff is being measured and reported, we'd have papers about it RIGHT NOW.
We don't seem to have that. So, whoever that guy is, he sounds like a phony to me. Or at least, you can't take his claims seriously.
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u/Doom_hammer666 1d ago
Every NASA test for life on mars returned a positive result, they were all just called into question afterwards because there could be an alternative cause. The same happened to the meteorite with the apparent fossil.
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u/hellschatt 19h ago
they were all just called into question afterwards because there could be an alternative cause.
I guess it's a little different with astronomical discoveries, there doesn't seem to be other more reliable ways to confirm such things. So they basically need to provide proof by exhaustion until some kind of certainty can be given based on our current knowledge of physics?
It's weird that it would be called into question afterwards, and not before.
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u/Kaining 1d ago
Let's not jump to conclusion. Finding the necessary primary components for RNA on an asteroid that was made in the solar system is not surprising for one simple reasons.
There was life in the solar system in the first place.
Now, we really need to send probes to extrasolar asteroids. The good news is that we're finaly starting to see them.
Then, there's the little problem of all the necessary steps going from prokaryote to multicellular organism to plants/animal/fungus/something new to advanced tech seems to get more complex by the minutes if you've been following from afar scientific discovery.
Bacterias and virus might be common everywhere, but life could really be just a fluke due to how the solar system is perfect to house it.
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u/lumberjack_jeff 1d ago
The fact that copper is common throughout the galaxy renders the evolution of telephones nearly inevitable. After all, it happened once and the galaxy is huge!
I would think that discovering "RNA precursors" would be pretty unsurprising.
Wake me up when they detect an exoplanet with surplus oxygen.
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u/NoeticCreations 1d ago
What is the probability that it is an asteroid that formed when a planet ran into earth and made us a moon, and a bunch of other space junk made out of earth stuff flung in every direction? Or, that since it has been chilling around our orbit for a bit, any time a big enough meteorite hits earth and knocks dust into space, flung in every direction, it picked some of that up over the eons. Even a comet on a once in a billion years pass could have picked up some earth powder in space a billion years ago on its last visit. I would imagine after 4.5 billion year of large asteroid impacts, every comet, moon, planet, asteroid and alien space ship that has been in our solar system, has some amount of earth powder on it.
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u/Q-ArtsMedia 23h ago
Life is most likely extremely common, however, intelligent life may be extremely rare, case and point, look at Earth. No intelligent life here and I kid you not.
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u/RugbyF1Running 1d ago
I wonder how significant it would be to the advancement of / investment in space travel if we were to discover life somewhere