Five years ago, a spacecraft named Osiris-REx came face-to-face with an asteroidA small body in space, made of metal and rock material. Asteroids usually orbit the sun, but if knocked off course they can be drawn into Earth's gravity and fall towards it. half a kilometre across. It released a little capsule that drifted towards the huge rock and collected a tiny sample of just 250 grams.

On Sunday, that capsule finally arrived home. Now scientists hope its hamster-sized sample will help them unlock the mysteries of life, the universeEverything. Including all of time and space and its contents. and everything.

Scientists believe the building blocks of life might have been left here billions of years ago through impacts by asteroids like Bennu.

Bennu has not changed much since the solar system was formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. That means studying it is like going back in time to the formation of the Earth. It could give us key information about how we came to be.

If Bennu offers us the key to life on Earth, it might tell us something about death. There is a one in 2,700 chance that Bennu might one day collide with our planet.¹

That might not seem like much, but the stakes are very high. The shockwaves would knock down whole cities.²

So it is worth knowing how to stop it. NasaThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration, responsible for the US space programme. hopes studying this sample can help.

No wonder the team behind Osiris-REx is over the moon. But some philosophers are less convinced.

They are worried that these days, when people talk about finding the "key" to life, they almost always mean finding out how life came to be.

The problem, they argue, is that science is not really capable of answering the question. It might one day be able to tell us how life came to be, but it cannot explain why we live.

They think the fact we want space to tell us why we exist shows that we are no longer confident we can find a reason for our existence here on Earth. It speaks to our deep pessimismAlways expecting the worst. about the human race and our future.

Yes: Scientists have long believed the building blocks of life might have started in space. This is our best chance yet to prove it and begin to understand where life came from.

No: Science cannot hold the key to life. The question of why we live is a philosophical one, and answering it will mean engaging with difficult questions about who we are and how we should behave. This is just a cop-out.

Or... Science and philosophy are looking to do different things here. It is interesting and useful to know where life came from. But that should not be a substitute for thinking about why we live.