How Life Came to Earth

“Buckyballs are huge molecular conglomerations of carbon atoms in the shape of soccer balls, and it turns out space is absolutely teeming with them. It’s quite possible that life on Earth couldn’t have happened without these wonderfully-named buckyballs. … Last year, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was able to confirm the existence of buckyballs in space, but astronomers had no way to judge their relative quantity Now we know the universe is absolutely packed with buckyballs, as Spitzer turned up the molecules throughout the Milky Way, as well as a reserve in a nearby galaxy that was fifteen times the mass of the Moon.”