This is interesting:
My question is: I thought complex organic molecules like sugar and alcohol were only possible through biological processes. Do we know where they come from, or how they are created at the formation of the solar system?
No, those are simply the means by which it is easier to obtain them… so long as we’re talking about a sugar and an alcohol as common as table sugar and ethanol, but those simply happen to be common in our own environment; glucose obtained from biological sources is the preferred starting point for what’s called “sugar chemistry”, making complicated sugars and other types of molecules which are similar to them, simply because it’s so abundant and cheap compared with other possible starting points. The partial redox processes to make ethanol from other small C-containing chemicals are theoretically possible outside of a living cell or a reactor, but the “correct environment” (the cell or reactor) makes them a lot easier.
The first biological process took place directly after an inorganic process, unless you want to posit that Someone went and made the first biological system.
Wiki has an explanation of how Tholins come to be.
Road trip.
Back in the 1700s when chemistry was a new science folks thought anything involving carbon had to be biological in origin. So they coined the terms “organic chemistry” and “inorganic chemistry” to mean with- and with-out carbon.
The terms survive today although we now know enough chemistry to understand the distinction is utterly baseless. Carbon chemistry is interesting enough that it deserves its own term. It’s just inertia that we continue to use a fundamentally wrong-headed term. Chemistry has a lot of that sort of thinking embedded in it.
FWIW, the “sugar” that was found is glycoaldehyde, the simplest possible 2-carbon sugar.
Does anyone have some good suggested reading on the chemistry of schmutz in space? I know the atoms get synthesized and spread around the galaxy in supernovae, and we end up with planetary systems where that material ends up as asteroids, comets, and planets. I take it there must be some sort of condensation of interstellar gases into some kind of dust?
The regimes involved, from insanely high pressure/temperature plasma capable of fusing the heaviest elements, to nearly absolute zero vacuum, are a little different from what I’m used to dealing with in biochemistry…
So we need to amend that Joni Mitchell lyric from “we are stardust” to “we are the puke from a college girl who’s had too many jello shots?”
Dinosaur poop. We’re all dinosaur poop.
See here for more: https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/
Go home comet, you’re drunk. 
And giving me cavities to boot. 
Fancy that, it turns out that if a comet has too much alcohol it ends up in a coma.
I thought this was going to be about a fun experiment similar to a baking soda and vinegar volcano, only involving Comet Cleanser and two other ingredients.
Nice point.
Ground control to major Tom Collins…
It’s like Heavens’ Gate for frat boys.