Why Stardust is awesome

NASA has just revealed that the Stardust spacecraft has found glycine in the tail of a comet!

"But Ken", you say, "so what?"

Well, I'll tell you what! Glycine is a fundamental building block of life, which is a fancy way of saying that glycine is one of the 20 amino acids that ALL of our cells are built from. Finding glycine in space adds further weight to the panspermia theory that I was on about recently.

Breifly, panspermia is the theory that life on earth was "seeded from space". Panspermia argues that either life, or the building blocks of life, were transported to earth from somewhere else by some mechanism.

Before we could consider the panspermia theory to be plausible (which is the lowest level of theory) we'd need to know two things:

1. that stuff can be transported from planet to planet (either within or between solar systems), and
   
2. that life or the building blocks of life exist elsewhere.

Now, point one is cool, we already know that it's happened in our very own solar system: we've found Meteorites from Mars on Earth... well, we don't know it in any absolutist positivist sense, but you know what I mean, there are multiple converging lines of evidence and a Martian origin is the strongest theory explaining their origins.

Moving on, the discovery of glycene in a comet in our own solar system is strong evidence for point two. I say strong evidence because there's already some evidence of amino acids in space, although it's somwehat equivocal (i.e., not 100 % convincing, could be caused by other things).

So, Stardust discoverd glycene in a comets tail, and life might have come from the void between stars. Stardust is awesome.

Q.E.D

P.S. Ha, I get it! Stardust! D'you see why they named it that?