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0:00 Wonderful person, this is Anton, and in this video, we're going to discuss some of the recent studies that sort of rewrites 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 a somewhat beautiful and almost a romantic idea of a primordial soup serving [snorts] 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 these two recent papers from August and June of 2026,
0:46 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, last universal common ancestor. With this new evidence, seen that Luca was not fully alive, and she 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 archaea, did not just split off from Luca, but instead represented a
1:31 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 how even [clears throat] 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 yes, let's start with this most recent bombshell published in August of
2:17 2026. The study that as always you can find in the description below. And here the team of scientists led by Natalia Jawak published their paper in Science Advances that essentially tried to solve a biological paradox. How did the very first cells build proteins before they had the enzymes to make the building blocks for some of those proteins? It's [snorts] a kind of a biological chicken and the egg problem. And that's because if you look at a typical modern cell, they usually use a lot of different enzymes to for example, speed up various reactions and to catalyze a lot of other stuff. But you actually need those same chemical reactions to make the amino acids that build the enzymes in the first place. And so how exactly did all of this start and what started what? And
3:02 well, to try to answer this question, the researchers harnessed protein structure and peered back more than 4 billion years in order to try to understand this Luca, this last common ancestor of everything on Earth. But what they found was that Luca was missing a massive chunk of essential enzymes required to synthesize amino acids and cofactors. And in order to try to figure out all of this, researchers tried to map metabolism in a lot of different bacteria and archaea creating a kind of a network of chemical reactions. Essentially, they tried to find out how different types of life use different types of metabolism to survive. And so in essence, here metabolism was actually treated as a kind of a single mathematical network with each chemical component connected by reactions that transform them. But
3:49 importantly, they tried to compare metabolism in bacteria and archaea, and then discovered various differences. And so here researchers harnessed protein structures and discovered that LUCA seemed to be missing a huge chunk of essential enzymes required to synthesize amino acids and cofactors. Which, of course, raises the next question. If it didn't have these genes, and if it could not metabolize very well, how exactly did it survive? Well, here the assumption is that it lived inside microscopic pores of various rock formations inside alkaline hydrothermal vents. So basically something resembling this. And so instead of using complex organic enzymes, LUCA relied on something else. It used different types of transition metals, specifically iron,
4:35 cobalt, and nickel, and possibly even other metals like palladium, which were naturally deposited inside the rock chimneys by all of these hydrothermal vents. And these metals then acted as a kind of a geological forerunner of an actual enzyme. Or basically these metals acted as a very important source of this early metabolism. And well, because it used metals, this is why it can kind of be called a cyborg, I guess. Not a real cell, not real life yet. With the implication being that LUCA was basically an incomplete life and relied on this hybrid metabolism. And that, of course, means that LUCA was most likely immobile and was basically attached to these rocks. It could not live anywhere and was just a cluster of RNA, DNA, and
5:22 basic translation machinery that was permanently locked inside. And it very likely depended on the Earth's crust to breathe, eat, and power all of its reactions. I guess in some sense you can even think of it as living rock because it was formed inside the rock and could not live without it. But here's where things get even more exciting. By comparing the genome of bacteria and archaea, or the two oldest life domains on Earth, they confirmed that they only shared about half of the enzymes needed for some of the score metabolism. But turns out that the other half was completely different and unique to each branch, which essentially suggests that both bacteria and archaea seem to have evolved their own specialized organic enzymes in the last 4 billion years, and
6:08 both of them very likely evolved from Luca independently. In other words, only half of the genetic material seems to be from Luca, but the other half was evolved afterwards once each bacteria and archaea formed their own independent life. Or basically once they became free floating living cells. And that essentially means that the transition from geological chemistry to free living biology happened at least twice independently. And the path to this free floating life was not just a single fluke, but seems to have been a repeated experiment. Or at least that's what the study concludes at the end. Now obviously this is quite a grand proposition and would definitely require confirmations, but right now the evidence does suggest that life evolved
6:55 twice early on. Although to do this it also required a lot of raw ingredients, specifically things like nitrogen and phosphorus. And to get that we have to look up into the skies because to understand how Earth even got these ingredients, we have to take a look at a different study from June of 2026. And so in this study supported by NASA, scientists looked at the ratios of phosphorus to nitrogen in a lot of ancient meteorites. And that's because for a long time astrobiologists tried to find out where Earth acquired a lot of these life needed elements. And while some scientists thought it was maybe from comets or meteorites, well other scientists thought that maybe it's coming from somewhere else in the outer belt of the solar system and possibly even from objects similar to Pluto. But
7:40 by studying the chemical signatures of iron meteorites, which represent the oldest generation of planetesimals, as well as slightly younger second generation chondrite meteorites, the researchers here build a chemical map of the early solar system. And they actually discovered something incredible. Here, Jupiter seems to play a major role, and specifically because of Jupiter's massive size. Its immense gravity acts as a physical barrier and actually restricts the movement of elements like phosphorus and nitrogen from migrating between the inner and outer solar system, which means that the material from the inner solar system, where Earth is located, became highly enriched in certain things, and a lot of them were a requirement for life. And that means that Earth did not need these
8:26 outer space deliveries because Jupiter made sure that the local building blocks of life were already on Earth from the very start. But when it comes to things like nitrogen, it does get just a little bit more complicated because nitrogen by itself is not particularly useful. It has to be in a more usable form in order to be used by life. And well, today it's actually these specialized bacteria that usually fix nitrogen and then allow plants and all of other life to use it. But bacteria did not exist yet, and so there was a kind of an organic nitrogen bottleneck. And well, historically scientists thought that maybe all of this was the result of initial thunderstorms, basically lightning zapping nitrogen gas and forming nitrates. But in some of the recent studies, chemists actually tried to
9:12 recreate this reaction by simulating early Earth's atmosphere and by creating a lightning in the lab. And they realized that zapping the volcanic gases with lightning was actually extremely inefficient because a lot of the early atmosphere contained carbon dioxide and molecular nitrogen. And so it was extremely difficult to produce organic nitrogen. But there was actually something that could produce it, our sun, the sun 4 billion years ago, was extremely, extremely active. And though it was about 3% dimmer than today, it actually released a lot of different super flares in the solar system, very likely every few days. And here this NASA study proved that a lot of these high-energy solar protons interacted with the volcanic atmosphere on Earth
9:58 and managed to produce a lot of different amino acids and nitrates, at least a million times more efficient way than lightning. Or basically, the early sun very likely played a major role with a lot of these nitrates then falling on a surface. And eventually, as the water developed on the surface, all of this mixed with the water and created just the right conditions for some of this first life to start. And so, our active young sun, and of course, certain volcanic reactions most likely formed many of these building blocks of life in the first 500 million years of Earth's existence. Although, apart from nitrogen, there's also what's known as the phosphate problem. And in this case, phosphate is also important because it's the backbone of DNA, RNA, and proteins.
10:43 Without it, you cannot build a genetic code. And while in nature, phosphate is incredibly rare because it reacts instantly with things like calcium to form calcium phosphate. That's of course the insoluble material that makes up our bones and tooth enamel and does not dissolve in water, which means that early life could not use it. And so, this was actually the other major roadblock to the story of the origin of life. How did early Earth accumulate so many different phosphates with concentrations hundreds of thousands of times higher than would be possible if it was just calcium phosphates inside the oceans. And here once again, a team of geologists from the University of Washington published a paper in Communications Earth and Environment that possibly solved this mystery. And
11:29 they They this by driving for 7 hours away from Seattle, a location referred to as the Last Chance Lake. This is actually in British Columbia, Canada. And well, this is technically a soda lake, extremely salty with chemistry that's basically like a giant natural ball of baking soda. And because of a reaction between the underground water and the volcanic rock underneath, the lake is packed with dissolved sodium and carbonate. And that actually creates a kind of a magic chemistry trick. Because of this carbonate, the calcium inside the lake preferentially binds with the carbonate and magnesium and forms a mineral referred to as dolomite, which then settles at the bottom of the lake and locks away a lot of calcium inside.
12:15 But the phosphate in this case remains completely unbonded and has nowhere else to go but up into the water column. In other words, it then ends up being dissolved in water. And so during the dry summer months, evaporation concentrates the water and creates incredibly high phosphate levels that are a thousand times higher than in the oceans, making this the most phosphate-rich lake on the entire planet. And so what makes this lake really special is that it's so salty that a lot of modern nitrogen-fixing microbes cannot survive here. And since nothing is eating this phosphate, it just kind of accumulates, creating a perfect lifeless analog of what a lot of early Earth potentially looked like 4 billion years ago. And scientists also believe that there are similar lakes
13:01 possibly existed on Mars as well because we know that Mars was also volcanic, also contained water, and very likely had very similar water-rock chemistry that we observe in this case, which would have naturally solved this phosphate problem there, too. And as we saw in some other papers, when you combine this concentrated phosphate with phosphide and palladium, all of which technically can be found near hydrothermal vents, you get spontaneous, highly efficient phosphorylation reaction and a spontaneous creation of ADP and phosphoserine. Something that modern life requires, but in this case can be produced without modern biological enzymes. Just pure chemistry. Okay, let's try to kind of combine all of this into one overall picture. So
13:47 first here, we have a very active young sun. The sun showering the atmosphere with protons that rain down amino acids on the planet. We then have these volcanic lakes concentrating phosphates and we have deep-sea vents packed with natural metals facilitating the very first metabolic cycles. And eventually some of this chemistry basically becomes encapsulated in some of the early membranes giving rise to what we now call Luca. But who or what was Luca and what exactly could it not do yet? Well, based on 10,000 different gene families across 700 living microbial genomes, we now know that Luca was much more primitive than we thought and technically was not even life yet. It was a kind of a chemical replicator. And
14:32 though it potentially contained a genome of at least 2.75 megabases and was able to produce at least 2,600 proteins, it was also potentially completely dependent on its environment and could be described as a kind of a cyborg because it actually needed certain metals for metabolism. But at the same time, it seems to have also had an active immune system. This is based on a genetic analysis that tried to reconstruct Luca's genome that then discovered at least 19 genes that seem to protect Luca from some kind of a virus. And so even back then, over 4.2 billion years ago, there already was an organism attacking these early cells that basically resembled an early parasite. And so at this time, just 300 million years after the formation of the
15:18 planet, a lot of these pre-life cells were already locked in this active sophisticated evolutionary arms race, which most likely caused them to evolve even faster as they tried to form more defense and as they tried to protect themselves from these viral particles, which means that Luca didn't live in a lonely sterile environment, but was already a part of a kind of a newly formed ecological system that we're only now starting to understand. And so essentially all of these studies confirm that in order to start life on a planet, you do need to have a lot of interacting elements, including the elements from the star, from various planets in the star system, and from a very specific chemistry on the surface. But also importantly, none of these are technically rare. These are natural
16:03 processes that can exist somewhere else out there, implying that in theory, life can indeed form on other planets. And also implying that we don't need to look for these perfect Earth analogs to find this life, because chances are we might be able to find it even on objects like Enceladus and Europa. But I guess that's all we know for now. Let me know what you think about these ideas and these propositions. Until future studies, check out some of the previous videos in the description. Thank you for watching. Subscribe. Come back tomorrow to learn something else. Support the show on Patreon where you can find additional videos, videos without any ads, and can donate directly or by joining our membership that grants you early access. You can also support the show by buying a wonderful person t-shirt in the description below. Stay wonderful. I'll see you tomorrow. And as always bye-bye.
17:46 >> Mhm.
