David Kipping

And I found it really inspiring, this paper, because they had dated what's called Luca, which is the last universal common ancestor.

So we have a huge number of genes which are the same as each other.

But even with giraffes, octopuses, plants, there's a huge number of overlap.

So you can kind of retrace the tree and figure out what was the organism that started it all, that lived at the bottom of this tree.

And that's called Luca.

And that thing, they've now age-dated it to live 4.2 billion years ago.

So the oceans formed about 4.4 billion years ago.

And 200 million years after that, you've got organisms.

And not just one.

These things would have been all over the planet, all over the place.

There was a whole ecosphere at that point of these things.

So that was quick that life got going.

Yeah.

And that to me is probably the most compelling reason to believe that life is common.

What's out there?

Yeah.

I mean, Europa could have life on the weird exoplanet.

So it's certainly possible there's life all over the place.

I think what's interesting about the cosmic zoom out perspective of life is why do we live not where we live, but when we live in the history of the universe.

So the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.