A Raspberry-Flavored Universe

I am charmed by an article I read in the Guardian recently about a fascinating discovery. Scientists detected a natural sugar found in raspberries in an enormous cloud of dust and gas that’s near the heart of the Milky Way. I know I’m the one making this leap and this isn’t how chemistry works, but I imagine that if I were in space, and presuming I wouldn’t freeze to death, I could stick out my tongue and the air would taste faintly like raspberries.

Per the article:

“The simple sugar erythrulose appears to be produced through chemical reactions on tiny interstellar dust grains, which then rain down on nearby worlds or reach them after being incorporated into comets that eventually clatter into planets.

‘This is the very first sugar to be detected in interstellar space and it is important because it tells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought,’ said Dr. Izaskun Jiménez-Serra at Spain’s Centre for Astrobiology near Madrid. ‘It opens the possibility for life to develop on other worlds in a similar fashion to what it did on Earth.’”

And further down:

“The scientists estimate that millions of tonnes of erythrulose could have rained down on Earth when a surge of asteroids and comets battered the planet during what is called the Late Heavy Bombardment. ‘To have suffered this kind of rain of organics, I think that seems to have been a key step,’ Jiménez-Serra said. ‘That material could have contributed to prebiotic soups where the first biomolecules were synthesised.’”

I’m not going to touch the part about there being other planets and other life forms on those planets because to me, that just makes sense. Instead, what I keep coming back to is how interconnected everything is. More than a year ago, I wrote a post called “We are Nature” about how we aren’t separate from nature – we are nature. Most of the elements in the human body, like carbon, oxygen, calcium, and iron, were created in stars.

What didn’t occur to me until this article is that long before anything was created on Earth – forests or oceans or raspberry bushes – the universe was already creating not just elements of the periodic table, but chemical compounds. The kinds of molecules that living things on Earth would later use. Somehow, that makes the distance between “out there” and “down here” feel much smaller.

I’m not sure I have anything profound to say, no wisdom to share. I’m just noticing that instead of cold, deadly, hostile, space is nothing like that. Instead, some of the building blocks of life may not have originated on Earth at all, but arrived here on comets and meteorites, helping to nurture our young planet.

Yes, there are black holes, and meteors that destroy life, and planets that are just giant balls of gas, but that’s what balances out the good stuff. You can’t have constant creation and expansion. Destruction makes room for something else. Like raspberries.

I dream of a world where we understand some of the essential building blocks of life were already being assembled in outer space long before Earth existed. A world where we recognize we aren’t separate from nature, we are deeply connected, intertwined, and embedded into it. A world where we realize rather than being cold and hostile, space could literally be raspberry-flavored.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.