Okay, welcome back everyone. Well now, you know, we're at the edge of the most important question that we can ask in astronomy and that is, the origins of life. So we've taken our, we've gone all the way from studying our own solar system to studying whole other solar systems. To studying the theory of how solar systems form. And since we believe that planets are the home of life, we are now ready to take on the issue of life itself. But to do that, we have think a little bit about the chemical building blocks of life. So let's just think a little bit about basic chemistry, or, you know, the sort of the chemistry that we need for understanding life. And of course, all matter is made out of different elements, and all the elements were either came from the big bang itself or were forged inside of stars. in fact actually, it's only hydrogen and helium and a few other light elements that actually came from right after the big bang. Everything else carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. Were all fused inside the center of stars. So there is a you know array of elements that exist in the, the Universe. And there's all kinds of chemical combinations they can make and when they do those are called molecules. Life is composed of a specific subset of those. We think of life being organic chemistry and this seems to be chemistry where carbon is involved. but also things like oxygen and hydrogen are also involved. But organic chemistry is a, there's, because of carbon's the structure, its, its elemental structure, it, there's just a wild array of interactions that are possible for it. So in particular, you know, now you know, this would be, studying life would be impossible if it wasn't for the fact that life on earth has chosen a particular subset of molecular structure, what are called amino acids and nucleic acids, to really act as its building blocks. So you know, life on Earth is all based on a series of of, you know, complex molecules called amino acids. And basically. Eh, all the proteins, which are the structure and the, of, of, of cells. The structure of life, hair you know, the sun, the things inside of cells that move things around are all proteins. And they are all, every protein is built out of a, you know, a, a collection, a relatively small collection of amino acids. And so when we start thinking about how life formed, we're going to need to be thinking about amino acids and how those can combine into more complex molecules.
