> The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found.

The soup does matter, as does finding that the ingredients are everywhere.

I would guess there is a more primitive stage in the emergence of life where self-replicating soups (Kaufmann: metabolisms), including things like nucleobases and amino acids, capable of collective replication/expansion exist, before we get anything as sophisticated as nucleic acids and structural encoding.

Sub-Surface Sample: The sub-surface sample collection required an impactor to create a crater in order to retrieve material under the surface, not subjected to space weathering. This required removing a large volume of surface material with a powerful impactor. For this purpose, Hayabusa2 deployed on 5 April 2019 a free-flying gun with one "bullet", called the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI); the system contained a 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) copper projectile, shot onto the surface with an explosive propellant charge. Following SCI deployment, Hayabusa2 also left behind a deployable camera (DCAM3)[Note 1] to observe and map the precise location of the SCI impact, while the orbiter maneuvered to the far side of the asteroid to avoid being hit by debris from the impact.

It was expected that the SCI deployment would induce seismic shaking of the asteroid, a process considered important in the resurfacing of small airless bodies. However, post-impact images from the spacecraft revealed that little shaking had occurred, indicating the asteroid was significantly less cohesive than was expected.[76]

Duration: 36 seconds.0:36 The touchdown on and sampling of Ryugu on 11 July Approximately 40 minutes after separation, when the spacecraft was at a safe distance, the impactor was fired into the asteroid surface by detonating a 4.5 kg (9.9 lb) shaped charge of plasticized HMX for acceleration.[56][77] The copper impactor was shot onto the surface from an altitude of about 500 m (1,600 ft) and it excavated a crater of about 10 m (33 ft) in diameter, exposing pristine material.[15][32] The next step was the deployment on 4 June 2019 of a reflective target marker in the area near the crater to assist with navigation and descent.[33] The touchdown and sampling took place on 11 July 2019.[34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa2#Sampling

I'd also imagine that any type of chemistry that harvests energy from the environment is liable to find itself as a food source at the bottom of the food chain now that earth is teeming with life.

I think that self-replication, and ability to harvest chemicals and energy from the environment to make more of what you're built of, is the point of complexification of chemistry that is best considered as the most primitive form of life. From there you can go on to things that are capable of encoding structure and more complex chemical factories.

I suppose one signature of these earliest type of "emergent life" chemistries would be localized concentrations of things like these nucleobases that we know are the building blocks of life as we know it, but there may be other types of self-replicating chemistries that emerge too, that don't lead anywhere.

As to your question on we should see the formation of new life everywhere, well, if we looked hard enough we might? The answer is competitive exclusion. Abiogenesis would've occurred on a remarkably clean earth: any life now emerging from the proverbial space dust is both almost certainly not preconfigured for this biosphere, and is instantly drowning in competing microorganisms that are. Anything that does form is likely quickly killed either by natural forces or competing organisms. Meanwhile, our life goes everywhere: We've found living bacteria on the outside of the ISS!

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ryugu-asteroid-sample-rapidly-...

> Researchers from Imperial College London have discovered that a space-returned sample from asteroid Ryugu was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms, even under stringent contamination control measures.

https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/topics/003899.html

> As described in the discussion of the journal paper, all samples received from JAXA have undergone the initial description, storage, and sealing in dedicated containers under a nitrogen atmosphere. The samples are distributed to researchers without exposure to the Earth's atmosphere. The possibility of microbial contamination is therefore considered extremely low. In addition, organic and microbial contamination assessment of the environment at the curation facilities within JAXA (clean chamber) in which the Ryugu sample grains undergo the initial description are conducted 1 ~ 2 times a year. It has been confirmed and reported that the concentration of organic matter is at or below the same level as that of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid return sample glove box at the NASA Johnson Space Center, and that no microbial colonies have been detected in the microbial contamination assessment conducted with swabbing and culture medium (Yada et al., 2023). Based on these facts, we agree that the microbial contamination described in the paper did not occur during a process within JAXA, but under the laboratory environment of the allocated researchers.