{"id":220,"date":"2025-01-20T06:57:34","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T06:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/01\/20\/luca-is-the-progenitor-of-all-life-on-earth-but-its-genesis-has-implications-far-beyond-our-planet-biology-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-01-20T06:57:34","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T06:57:34","slug":"luca-is-the-progenitor-of-all-life-on-earth-but-its-genesis-has-implications-far-beyond-our-planet-biology-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/01\/20\/luca-is-the-progenitor-of-all-life-on-earth-but-its-genesis-has-implications-far-beyond-our-planet-biology-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Luca is the progenitor of all life on Earth. But its genesis has implications far beyond our planet | Biology | The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>If it holds up, the antiquity of Luca seems to overturn some earlier arguments for why the universe is largely lifeless. \u201cThese have been based on the evidence that it took about a billion years for life to emerge on Earth, meaning that these early steps were hard and\/or unlikely,\u201d says Donoghue. But a 4.2bn-year-old and already rather highly evolved Luca, Lenton says, \u201ctells us that [starting] life is not that hard. It can start all over the place on planets with liquid water, possibly including early Mars or even early Venus.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Astronomical searches for planets around other stars have suggested that Earth-like planets are not all that uncommon. Still, there might have been special features of our planet, Anderson cautions, that made it particularly amenable to life, such as a magnetic field to shield us from solar radiation, a large neighbouring planet (Jupiter) to sweep up stray asteroids, and a moon to create tides.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2025\/jan\/19\/luca-is-the-progenitor-of-all-life-on-earth-but-its-genesis-has-implications-far-beyond-our-planet\">www.theguardian.com\/science\/2025\/jan\/19\/luca-is-the-progenitor-of-all-life-on-earth-but-its-genesis-has-implications-far-beyond-our-planet<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If it holds up, the antiquity of Luca seems to overturn some earlier arguments for why the universe is largely lifeless. \u201cThese have been based on the evidence that it took about a billion years for life to emerge on Earth, meaning that these early steps were hard and\/or unlikely,\u201d says Donoghue. But a 4.2bn-year-old [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}