Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice • Hacker News Board

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#91

Post by jibal » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

binaryturtle wrote: post #36

mycall wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think there would be some isolated places where proto-life still exists for this to be true.

I always found it odd that there's only one single origin of life point or even just a single common ancestor considered in history. Shouldn't entirely new life develop all the time on earth? I mean the ingredients and building blocks are still there, the environmental situation still should work out, like availability of water, temperatures, etc. We should see a constant emergence of new life all the time. Why would…

The building blocks will be immediately consumed by existing life. And that's just one way in which the world is radically different from the one in which life arose.

And life may have arisen from a very low probability set of circumstances ... there's no reason to expect it to be happening all the time.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#92

Post by jibal » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:16 AM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #62

If life could arise once, why would the conditions not be amenable to it arising more than once? Sure, life tends to pollute-terraform for itself, but it's a big planet, with more than enough distance between the first occurrence and pristine environment for it to happen several more times.

binaryturtle asked this question above and got about 10 responses. Conditions are very different, precursors to life get quickly consumed by existing life, origin of life is a rare event, etc.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#93

Post by jibal » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

theodorejb wrote: post #5

[flagged]

> The idea that life came about by luck is completely absurd

Argument by ridicule is a fallacy.

> even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.

But, as I'm sure you have been told many times, that's an absurd strawman, and suggests that you didn't read TFA or anything else that discusses how life may have arisen, including any of the other comments here. Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.

> As I see it

I can't think of anything less compelling.

> life was clearly designed by God.

That is semantically incoherent, as well as being a violation of HN guidelines ("Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.")

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#94

Post by nativeit » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:39 AM UTC

randomImmigrant wrote: post #25

The metabolic science is really cool. The conclusion that life arose twice requires you to buy that proto-cells that grew on these vents and needed those metallic surfaces to survive didn’t count as “life”. Then, free living cells, bacteria and archea, could maybe be argued as having independent paths as they plugged the gaps in their metabolism independently. Same DNA/RNA, same proteins. Same broad rules of metaboli…

> …one of them at the other,

The origin of life is as romantic as I’d hoped.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#95

Post by theodorejb » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 5:11 AM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #21

theodorejb wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Could you go into why you consider the existence of an invisible (all powerful? Depends which god you mean, you didn't say) being that happens to concern itself with life on Sol's third planet, to be less absurd than what you describe? Or is that the joke and I'm missing it?

We know that intricate machines are designed by smart people; they don't just happen by luck. The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale. It has never been observed, and even in the most controlled of environments it cannot be replicated. To me it's far more reasonable to conclude that life was designed by a super intelligent Creator. Just as a piano implies a piano maker (even if we haven't seen them), life implies an original Life-giver.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#96

Post by throwawaysoxjje » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:08 AM UTC

theodorejb wrote: post #95

margalabargala wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you go into why you consider the existence of an invisible (all powerful? Depends which god you mean, you didn't say) being that happens to concern itself with life on Sol's third planet, to be less absurd than what you describe? Or is that the joke and I'm missing it?

We know that intricate machines are designed by smart people; they don't just happen by luck. The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale. It has never been observed, and even in the most controlled of environments it cannot be replicated. To me it's far more reasonable to c…

> The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale.

Really? Because when you look at something like the human retina, the organization is embarrassing.

Especially since there are older, extant examples with better organization.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#97

Post by snovv_crash » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:20 AM UTC

randomImmigrant wrote: post #83

neuralkoi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper claims LUCA doesn't count as life because it still depended on its environment to metabolize. It's kind of interesting that there's parasites that arguably don't meet this definition either. Looking it up: Chlamydia can't reproduce independently; relies on its host's metabolism. Microsporidia can't make ATP on its own. Are these "life"?

The difference is more on survival. A closed loop metabolism is indeed a good boundary marker. Viruses would fail this. But many have “closed but for a few critical dependencies”, and the argument here is that when life depended on metals like this, it’s more critical dependencies than closed loop. Somewhere in there is a transition. But it’s poorly defined, and so the argument can be there was a bifurcation of sorts…

People love to put things into neat boxes so that we can somehow reduce them to a single concept.

Unfortunately the real world is usually a bit more messy than that. This is one example that makes it pretty obvious that our model is a little bit overly reductive, and at least to me the "Is this life?" question seems to have an answer that is on a spectrum rather than binary.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#98

Post by hamilyon2 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

Many essential metabolic enzymes require metal ions for catalysis, structure, or substrate binding. So in some sense the dependence is still there, we just learned to take bits of substrate with us while travelling.

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#99

Post by pests » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC

xkcd1963 wrote: post #46

rationalist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a biblical scholar, but I think the "loving creator" thing was invented by people and not necessarily in the Bible. I'm pretty sure Old Testament God is pretty vengeful. Theistic Evolution is wide-enough belief, especially with Protestants.

This is edging into religious debate, which the guidelines ask people to keep off HN

The guidelines do not mention religion a single time. What are you talking about?

Re: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

#100

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #72

pfdietz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were that to happen it could be the worst news humanity ever receives, since it would greatly increase the chance the "Great Filter" is in front of us, not behind us.

The Great Filter is only one possible answer to the Fermi Paradox.

The Milky Way is almost 14 billion years old. The Milky Way is perhaps 100K light-years in diameter. If you can travel at 0.1c you could colonize the Milky Way in perhaps around a million years, less than 0.01% of the age of the Milky Way.

So, either there's a filter that's blocked interstellar colonization... or it has occurred already, and we just aren't aware of it (some sort of dark forest thing / we are being secretly watched by an extraterrestrial civilization).

(This is a haunted galaxy either way!)