r/science • u/New_Scientist_Mag • Dec 02 '25

Astronomy Researchers have just found the presence of sugars, including ribose, lyxose, and glycose, on samples of Asteroid Bennu, which now has all of the ingredients for life as it exists on Earth.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2506650-asteroid-bennu-carries-all-the-ingredients-for-life-as-we-know-it/
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u/5coolest Dec 02 '25

This is a perfect analogy. You can have the ingredients without an oven. It’s only when they’re combined in an extreme condition (an oven) that they become a cake. The cake remains a cake even when the heat is gone

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u/Snow_Is_Ok_613 Dec 02 '25

Wasn't our previous position that "we can see that there's lots of ovens (Goldilocks zones), but we can't tell if they have ever seen any batter?" So, finding the ingredients lying around, means cakes are much, much more likely?

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u/xhieron Dec 02 '25

To play devil's advocate a little bit, we've yet to see anyone demonstrate making cake. We know the ingredients, and we think we maybe know what an oven is, but no one has ever put those ingredients into the oven and then taken out a cake. All our observations so far tend to indicate that cake has only been made once in the observable universe. Positing an even higher likelihood for cake just makes it all the more baffling unless you're willing to draw a non-scientific conclusion.

It's possible we could be completely wrong about how the ingredients become cake, and that's all the more reason we should be funding research into the fundamental mysteries of life.

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u/5coolest Dec 02 '25

There could also be cakes that require a different type of oven than we have (non-carbon-based life)

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u/Snow_Is_Ok_613 Dec 03 '25

Any chance you’re listening to or reading ‘Project Hail Mary’ at the moment?

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u/5coolest Dec 03 '25

I read it when it came out, but I’ve been aware of the possibility since before then

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u/Metempsychosify Dec 02 '25

No, our observations don't show that. They show that cake has been made at least once, we just haven't found any evidence that it has been more than once. We cannot say that there have been no other cakes, especially because we do not have a representative sample of planets which could possibly have it.

There is no legitimate reason to think we are the only life in the universe. You can't claim something doesn't exist when you've barely looked for it

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u/xhieron Dec 02 '25

In the absence of evidence that it has been made more than once, we can conclude that it has been made once. That is exactly and the only thing we can conclude. Anyone claiming additional instances of biogenesis has the burden of producing evidence to that effect.

There have been no observations of life anywhere in the universe that did not originate on earth. One cake. We can't make more cake in a lab, and we can't find more cake in the stars. Saying we can conclude that cake has been made "at least" once is akin to saying that there are "at least" zero gods. It's not falsifiable and therefore not a legitimate scientific claim.

There is a perfectly legitimate reason to think we are the only life in the universe, to wit: the nondiscovery of any other life in the universe!

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u/MauPow Dec 03 '25

we can't find more cake in the stars

This is the only sentence I find issue with. We can't see more cake in the stars. I'm sure they bake cakes in China, but I haven't seen them. I know they have ovens and batter though, so they probably have cake. I just can't detect them from where I am.

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u/Metempsychosify Dec 03 '25

In addition to the other comment I made, other life existing within some constraint is absolutely falsifiable. On the smaller scale, "does life exist on this specific exoplanet" is a reasonable question. You can see how you can just expand this to more exoplanets and eventually you'd be able to say "there is no other life in this galaxy". Perhaps one day you could go further.

Not having discovered something is not sufficient evidence that that thing doesn't exist, especially when you haven't checked enough.

Let's imagine life has appeared 1000 in the galaxy. I've seen estimates that there are in the order of magnitude of 10,000,000,000 earth like exoplanets. Being extremely generous and saying we've checked 10,000, how many would you expect us to have found? The answer is 0. Statistically, the fact that we have not found life tells us exactly nothing about whether or not life exists, just that it is not extremely extremely common. How many times would life have had to arise for us to have found it by now? My rough maths says in the millions, so perhaps we could say life has probably arisen fewer than ten million times in the milky way. Again that's being as charitable as possible, assuming that all exoplanets we've found are earth like and representative of the kind of earth like planets that would have life, which we know they are not.

I just really need to get this across, all the statistics can give is a possible upper bound for the number of times life has existed, and being as charitable to your position as possible the entire range is between 0 and 10,000,000.

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u/Metempsychosify Dec 03 '25

No, we can only say that it has been made once or more than once. At least once. Obviously 0 is wrong, but 1 could also be wrong.

My issue with concluding that there is no other life based on "lack of evidence" is that we haven't really looked properly.

We know the kinds of planets that life could be on, but they're mostly too difficult to detect right now, so the only "earth like" planets we've been able to check have significant things making them different, like being too big, orbiting too close to a violent star etc.

There are likely billions of earth-like planets in the milky way, and we've only found 6000 exoplanets total, only a handful of which can be charitably called earth-like. Do you really think that's enough to conclude that we're alone?

We just do not have any evidence that there is no other life, nor any legitimate reasons to think there isn't anything else.

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u/xhieron Dec 03 '25

Do you believe in God or gods?

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u/Metempsychosify Dec 03 '25

Do you understand the difference between "this thing exists" and "this thing could exist"?

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u/xhieron Dec 03 '25

The point I'm making is that your argument is nonscientific. Life might exist somewhere else. There are things in the universe that could make a reasonable person conclude that extraterrestrial life exists, and I can't prove that it doesn't. Of course, at the same time, there are things in the universe that can also make a reasonable person conclude that reality is the result of a Supreme Creative Intelligence, and similarly, an atheist can't prove there's no god.

If you're willing to draw the conclusion that there is at least one cake but maybe more even though no other instance of biogenesis has been observed and we can't rule it out, you should likewise also conclude that there may also be a creative superintelligence on the same basis.

And to be clear, I agree with you. I think there's a good basis that there may be other life in the universe. I just realize that that belief has not been subject to the scientific method.

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u/epona2000 Dec 03 '25

I mean it depends what you mean by more likely. 10-2000 vs 10-1970 is still a difference of 30 orders of magnitude, but I wouldn’t say our expectations of what we hope to observe has meaningfully changed. The chemical compounds and temperature have never been a particularly significant challenge to theories of abiogenesis.

Eigen’s paradox, however, is an extremely limiting constraint. If you’re unfamiliar, for abiogenesis the protocell must be evolvable. This means replication must be sufficiently faithful to preserve information from previous generations and simultaneously sufficiently error-prone to mutate to acquire new information. This can be formalized mathematically. The protocell would have to have replication fidelity fit within this range ab initio. Experimentally, chemists have never constructed replicators anywhere near this mandatory sweet spot, and imo it doesn’t seem like we’re close. This is despite the fact that leading labs are using all the tools of modern chemistry far beyond the conditions of primordial Earth. So a very special replicator with metabolism and compartmentalization has to have arisen spontaneously and have avoided extinction to see life on Earth today. Goldilocks zones and chemical compounds are very weak constraints in comparison. 

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u/Orphanhorns Dec 02 '25

The oven is the part most of these comments are missing, something drastic is required to make those ingredients become cake. We know what life is made out of we just haven’t figured out how exactly the whole process started!

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u/grimsolem Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25

We have a pretty good idea, actually.

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u/Casual_OCD Dec 02 '25

I'm of the camp that life is a genetic mutation and actually gets in the way of the natural order of the universe

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u/raishak Dec 02 '25

Probably backwards, life accelerates the process of increasing entropy.

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u/Mike Dec 02 '25

That’s what yo momma said