Life’s ingredients have been found in samples from asteroid Bennu

Looks like coal. It’d be *hilarious* (and typical of humanity) if we started mining asteroids bringing stuff back and then just setting it on fire.

We sent a spacecraft millions of kilometers away, touched an asteroid, and brought back a piece of it. The fact that we can do this is still mind-blowing.

My understanding is that ingredients for life (as we know it?) are thought to be quite plentiful throughout our solar system/galaxy/universe, right? The trick is that much like I can possess the ingredients for a high quality meal, the specific conditions necessary for the ingredients to yield actual life are rare (although our understanding of just how rare is limited by several factors). So it’s simultaneously likely that life does, has, or will exist elsewhere in the universe (if not our own galaxy) and we will never see it in our lifetimes (or perhaps within the history of our species), right?