Exogenesis, or how we're all space aliens.

[Jude]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid-collision-meteoroid-amino-acids-life-101215.html

I had to come up with a silly title so that people would read it.

Baseless ignorant speculation:  would this make finding life elsewhere in the universe more likely?

[Vekseid]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid-collision-meteoroid-amino-acids-life-101215.html

I had to come up with a silly title so that people would read it.

Baseless ignorant speculation:  would this make finding life elsewhere in the universe more likely?

Given how quickly it seems that life appeared on Earth, it's generally assumed that, if a planet has the conditions for life to begin, life will form there. It might be through panspermia or it might be local, but life showed up far too soon for it to be 'difficult', so to speak.

[DarklingAlice]

From this article alone I don't see a compelling case that this is not merely contamination. It is an oft repeated error to say that:

Life on Earth uses left-handed amino acids, and they are never mixed with right-handed ones, but the amino acids found in the meteorite had equal amounts of the left and right-handed varieties.

And once again reflects the hopeless bias towards eukaryotes that these astrobiologists always tend to display.

D-Amino acids are absurdly common in the peptidoglycan of most bacteria (for the simple reason that most bacteria-bacteria conflict and bacteria-eukaryote conflict is mediated through the use of proteases and the post translational modification of membrane amino-acids to D is a profitable survival mechanism). If L/D ratio is their sole criteria for disproving contamination, they have not sufficiently demonstrated their premise.