  The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern
science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must
first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life
on Earth. A key missing piece is the origin of biomolecular homochirality:
permeating almost every life-form on Earth is the presence of exclusively
levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. In this work we discuss recent
results suggesting that life's homochirality resulted from sequential chiral
symmetry breaking triggered by environmental events in a mechanism referred to
as punctuated chirality. Applying these arguments to other potentially
life-bearing platforms has significant implications for the search for
extraterrestrial life: we predict that a statistically representative sampling
of extraterrestrial stereochemistry will be racemic on average.
