Speaker 0: forget everything you knew about the slow crawl of evolution. new genomic data just pushed the origin of our oldest ancestor back to a time when earth was still a molten hellscape. we discovered that the four point two billion years ago, life wasn't just surviving. it was already running a complex immune system to fight off viruses. the luca's life sophisticated four point two billion year origin. scientists use a molecular clock to date the last universe common ancestor, the last universal common ancestor, luca, to 4,200,000,000 ago, and they found it wasn't a primitive chemical blob, but an complex organ organism with over 2,600 genes and a functional crispr immune system. this proved that life hits the ground running. if complexity develops this fast under two hundred million years, the odds of finding life on mars or europa just skyrocketed. what do you think about this, john? Speaker 1: i think this is really cool. so let's let's let's get into some of the details about this, though. so like you said, new research suggested that luca lived around 4,200,000,000 years ago, and that's much earlier than what scientists previously thought. so that essentially means that life may have emerged on earth pretty quickly after the planet formed during a time when earth was still considered a violent volcanic, hellish environment bombarded by asteroids. so the thing about this is what makes this discovery so fascinating is that luca was, like you said, is probably not a simple blob of chemistry, barely hanging on. so they actually now think that they have a surprisingly sophisticated biology including a primitive immune systems offense, and a metabolism capable of using hydrogen and carbon dioxide for energy. now, one thing to note, luca is not kind of first life on earth. okay? that's one of the most important distinctions to understand. what they're saying is luca represents the last organism from which all current living organisms descent. okay? sorry for you you, non, darwinism people. but scientists infer its existence because every known life form shares universal biological systems. so we share dna, rna, genetic coding, atp as the energy currency, ribosomes for protein synthesis, nearly identical genetic code structures, and shared amino acids and cellular chemistry. so these shared features, they strongly suggest that all modern life inherited them from a common ancestor, this is this is a really cool, discovery. what are your thoughts on this? does it blow? Speaker 0: it blows my mind, you know. think of this update like finding a fully functional high speed fiber router inside a victorian era house. we expected the first life to be a carrier pigeon, slow and simple, but it turns out luca was already running a digital defense network against hackers, viruses, before the earth's crust even cooled down. they had a complex immune system that did all sorts of things that, changes the way we look at how quickly these organisms develop. Speaker 1: yeah. this alright. go ahead. nope. so, like, just to kinda put it in so, like, earth, essentially, they said the they're they're guesstimating it formed around 4,540,000,000 years ago. so we're talking about luca existing around 4,200,000,000 years with an estimated range between four point zero nine and four point three three billion years ago. so they kind of rewound evolution backward through time to kind of figure this out, which is really cool. but the reason why this is a cool discovery is that for decades, many scientists assume that life couldn't stabilize during what's what was called the hadean eon, which is when earth formed with all of the volcanic activity. but, essentially, this new discovery estimates that luca, life emerged while the planet was still super chaotic, which has huge implications. right? so the study itself also compresses the timeline between earth becoming habitable, the origin of life, and the evolution of relatively sophisticated biology. so some researchers now think the transition from non life chemistry to cellular life may have happened within only and i yeah. i know. these are big numbers, though. a hundred to two hundred million years after stable oceans appeared. so this is from a geologist. geologically speaking, this isn't me. this is almost instantaneous, which kinda blows my mind. Speaker 0: so the spreeters team also discovered 19 crispr c x cas nine genes in the reconstructed luca genome. a crispr cas nine is the same system that modern scientists use to edit dna in labs today, but in luca, it was being used as a natural immune defense system. it's amazing that the things we're learning and that the origins of life are not what we thought they were. the team utilized a pairology based molecular clocking by tracking gene pairs that duplicate before the bacteria archaea split. they bypass the usual noise of horizontal gene transfer providing a higher resolution of the hadan timeline. yeah. this is the most significant recalibration of the tree of life since the nineteen seventies discovery of the archaea by, carl woese. it effectively compresses the timeline of abo genesis to complexity by hundreds of millions of years. Speaker 1: yeah. so the other thing too, and this is one of the least discussed, but i think most intellectually interesting aspects is that viruses may be almost as ancient as life itself. so just think about this. if luca had antiviral defenses, then viruses or virus like genetic parasites may have existed near the very origin of life itself. like, we're talking yin and yang, good and bad type stuff. right? the balance of life. that means that evolutionary competition probably emerged extremely early, and life may have become an arms race almost immediately. and it completely changes the simplistic picture that many people have of early life as isolated primitive cells peacefully evolving. right? which i think that that's another aspect that kinda blows my mind. oh, you're on mute. Speaker 0: sorry about that. luca was likely a methane maker's roommate. it lived in a communal ecosystem where its waste products, acetate and hydrogen, were the primary currency for the other microbes, meaning a social biology that is as old as life itself. molecular clocks are models, not physical fossils. critics argue that the horizontal gene transfer, microbe swapping genes like trading cards can blur lines, potentially making luca look more complex than it actually was. so there are some skeptics around this, but it, we'll have to see, as we progress and we start getting more analysis of other planets, if we're gonna see the similar type things. Speaker 1: yeah. Speaker 0: thought life didn't wait for the perfect moment to start. it grabbed the hate on earth by the throat and started innovating immediately. if life can go from zero to crispr in two hundred million years on a volcanic earth, do you think we're gonna find luca two point o under, ice of europa? let us know Speaker 1: in Speaker 0: the chat.