Over three-quarters of a century, prebiotic chemists have explored geochemical processes that led to the formation, polymerization, and functionalization of the building blocks of life. The accumulated knowledge could be a clue to realize green and sustainable material production that curbs climate change. Here I briefly review the current and predicted climate situations, along with measures taken in Japan. This is followed by a discussion on the potential benefit of prebiotic chemistry to this subject. A focus is placed on the issues involving sulfur, a key element for the origin, evolution, and future of life.

  Since the detection of extraterrestrial amino acids in the Murchison meteorite, dramatic improvements in chromatographic techniques with mass spectrometry over the past half century have revealed the presence of a wide variety of organic compounds of extraterrestrial origin in carbonaceous meteorites. The possibility that biologically relevant compounds (amino acids, sugars, nucleobases, etc.) contained in extraterrestrial materials were transported to the early Earth and contributed to the primordial molecular evolution has been discussed in many previous works. In this sense, organic analysis of carbonaceous meteorites provides unique geological evidence for understanding the distributions of organic molecules that may have been available on the prebiotic Earth. Equally important, determining how the abiotic molecules in meteorites were formed in the Solar system will provide important clues for considering the pristine chemical reactions that proceeded on the early Earth. Here, this review overviews comprehensive reports on the distributions and characteristics of amino acids, sugars, and nucleobases found in carbonaceous meteorites with the aim of sharing the knowledge on pre-biologically relevant molecules of extraterrestrial origin.