Odds on the Philae comet lander finding prevalence of the "right" kind of aminoacids#In_biology) (conditional on the lander surviving long enough to run the experiment and transmit the results)?
I would guess < 1%.
I don't know much about organic chemistry, but amino acids are fairly simple molecules, and if memory serves they've been found free-floating in molecular clouds. I'd tentatively bet at 100:1 odds that that the right isomers of at least the simpler ones will be found conditional on the experiment being run, since a comet's basically a giant slushball of compounds left over from those molecular clouds.
On the other hand, I'd put the odds at well under 1% that we'll see terrestrial-like isomer ratios. That would be tantamount to finding a biosphere -- an ac...
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