Some commentators took the news to mean that life fell to earth from the sky.
Seems to me it just proves the early earth could have had them as well, since the early earth was more or less an oversize asteroid.
Earth was also hot enough to destroy any amino acid.
It’s a chicken and egg thing. At first, Earth was a molten mass that would have destroyed amino acids. About the time it cooled and solidified, it underwent a heavy bombardment by meteorites. It’s probably impossible to find whether amino acids formed here or came from space.
The essential point to take away from the factoid stated by the o.p. is not that life started in space or on the surface of the Earth (we’ll likely never know the answer to this) but that the essential building blocks for life as we know it exist commonly beyond the boundaries of planet Earth, and thus, the probability that life may exist elsewhere is greatly elevated. The question then becomes, “Under what conditions can these amino acids come together in an auto-catalyzing, self-replicating, thermodynamic-moderating, evolving pattern-coded manner that would have to precede what we would recognize as life?” Given the extremes that terrestrial life exists on Earth, the answer is that life could evolve elsewhere in the Solar system, and most certainly on planets around other stars where conditions are permissible and even favorable.
Stranger
I think the question is how those things form in the first place.
If they form, like everything else apparently, by hydrogen combining to make other elements and then those combining, then the process could have been ongoing even before earth or the asteroids, and could certainly happen on earth again after the heating without the asteroids.
It would just be a matter of time and temperature, and the eons produce plenty of combinations.
There are probably new ones cropping up all the time, and probably life is continuously regenerating from random bits combining, without ancient seed molecules but new ones.
Something to remember about this story is that amino acids have been found in meteors (Murchison meteorite - Wikipedia), but I think this is the first time they have been collected in a sample from a comet in space.
It would seem like the process of planet formation may have destroyed the amino acids present. Another thing came to mind, our planet is commonly referred to as ‘mother’ earth, while comets sort of resemble the shape of sperm.
The life-from space solution is kind of humorous to me.
The reason people are quick to jump to it is because we can’t figure out exactly how life formed on earth, so it being shuttled in from elsewhere on an asteroid is a quick solution. Except, then you have to wonder how life formed there in the first place.
And, besides, in the long run, absolutely everything got here via asteroid. The Earth, at one point, did not exist. Then a bunch of iron, silicon, hydrogen, helium, and carbon molecules started globbing together, then more and more, and then it started drawing in asteroids, which began to make up the bulk of its mass. There was no Earth, then asteroids slammed into each other, and then there was Earth. The same is true of every other planet.
We are a hodgepodge of cosmological debris that happened to congregate in such a way that we’d have the right stuff and be the right distance from the sun to create a life-rich little oasis in the middle of an inky black sea of nothingness.
It could be possible that amino acids are quite common, but the rarity is for them to plop into an environment where they can flourish into life, and the extreme rarity is for them to do so and then eventually turn into a group of people who like Rachel Ray.