Scientists Find Evidence That Life on Earth Had Two Separate Origins | Last Universal Common Ancestor [LUCA]

[solo@slrpnk.net]

Hello person. This is Anton and in this video we're going to discuss some of the recent studies that sort of rewrite the idea behind the origin of life and specifically the story of how you, me and basically every living cell on the planet actually got here. And well that's because for decades we've had this somewhat beautiful and almost a romantic idea of a primordial soup serving as the origin of all life. We imagined a warm little pond billions of years ago, possibly zapped by lightning in order to create some kind of a single perfect cell that spontaneously snapped into existence and eventually split into the entire tree of life.

But according to at least two recent papers from August and June of 2026, that story seems to be kind of incomplete and possibly incorrect. and specifically because we now have a lot of new evidence in regards to something referred to as LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. With this new evidence suggesting that LUCA was not fully alive and it was more like some kind of a biological cyborg of chemistry and geology, physically stuck inside deep sea rocks and running its metabolism using raw metals as its engines. In other words, it was not truly alive and did not represent a living cell, which actually leads us to the next mind-blowing proposition.

The two main branches of life, the bacteria and the archa did not just split off from LUCA, but instead represented a completely separate evolution from this cyborg and evolved completely independently, possibly in two separate locations, which in a very real sense implies that cellular life potentially started not once but twice on our planet, which if confirmed would be revolutionary. And so in this video, we're going to discuss some of these recent discoveries, connect them to a few other ideas, including the ideas behind how Jupiter potentially played a role in a lot of this and howeven our baby sun influenced certain things as well. And though we're not going to be solving this biological paradox just yet, we are going to come just a little bit closer to answering the question of the origin of life. And so I guess let's start with this most recent bombshell published in August that as always you can find in the description below.