We're The Aliens, Man, Says Nasa, We're The Savages

Were you ever at, I don't know, a Rite Aid or Penn Station or a Grateful Dead concert or a family gathering where you looked around and got to feeling like everyone else there was an alien from outer space? Well, you were probably right, according to Science.

Essentially, we all come from outer space.

NASA astrobiologist Daniel Glavin and a team of colleagues recently conducted an experiment that provides more support for the theory that an asteroid collision seeded the earth with the elements that developed into basic forms of life. Amino acid molecules, which are the the building blocks of life, can form in corkscrew shapes either turning to the left or the right. For some reason, life on earth is made up of ones turning to the left.

Glavin and these other people who understand things that I cannot understand used special sunglasses to observe a special type of light, that, when shined on basic molecules of water, methanol and ammonia—which exist in space around—create a predominance of left-turning amino acids. As the BBC reports:

Light has a polarisation, which is to say that light rays oscillate along a given direction—say, up and down, or left and right. While we can't see this effect directly, it is apparent in polarising sunglasses, which block reflected light that tends to be polarised along the left-and-right direction. The light used by the researchers, by contrast, was what is known as circularly polarised. Rather than along a single direction, the polarisation traces out a corkscrew shape. Light in the regions around a forming star is known to become circularly polarised like this as it passes through vast clouds of dust grains that are aligned by magnetic fields. The experiments showed that the circularly polarised light led to the formation of both left- and right-handed amino acids—but there were slightly over a percent more of the left-handed version.

Again, I don't fully understand that. But I'm pretty sure I've seen those sunglasses.

Slightly over one percent is the same level of excess leftward-turning amino acid molecules Dr. Glavin and co. have measured in meteorites found here on earth. So it's looking good for the theory that life—or, really, just the essence of life—has extraterrestrial origins.

"This excess is pretty cool," said Glavin.

I'll say.