We know very well that we will all diethat Nadia will be freed from this fateful fate. Science no longer lives with such certainty, realizing that “the dust of our stars and the space dust that we will be” may be that the planet that gave rise to the type of life we are a part of has also passed away: in about 5,000 to 7,000 million years, it will be destroyed as the Sun turns into a red giant star and expands, increasing the size of Earth’s orbit.
In fact, much earlier, for example during 1,000 to 2,500 million years, when the fusion of hydrogen atoms present in the core of the Sun occurred at a helium density greater than that of hydrogen, solar radiation will be so great that the temperature at the Earth’s surface will cause the oceans to evaporate. And without water, obviously, the type of life we know cannot exist. We know this, so we should not forget that there may be other solutions based on other chemical elements and relationships than those based on ADN.
But all of this takes place much more often in the future, on a time scale that we can hardly do ourselves: note that it is generally accepted that the “last common universal ancestor” of real living organisms is the term LUCA (“last universal common ancestor”) that apparently existed in underwater hydrothermal fumaroles 4,000 million years.
LUCA was the “Arbol de la Vida” strain that cared the first three independent branchescorresponding to “bacteria”, “arqueas” (prokaryotes microorganisms, here without a nucleus) and “eukaryas” (composite organisms with cells with a nucleus), or only two, “bacteria” and “arqueas”, and which of this last origin are “eukaryotes”.
From the beginning, as Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in her brilliant new book, Life on a little-known planet (Debate, 2026), “Many things passed. The atmosphere filled with oxygen. Continents froze and separated. The entire planet froze and thawed. Plants and animals salted the water to stabilize them on Earth. The era of reptiles passed the mammals.”
And if all this happened in 4,000 million years, then thisThis cannot happen in the things I mentionedIt is rare in the history of the Earth that changes are produced at the rate at which they have been produced recently (climate change, ocean acidification, forest reduction, disappearance or disappearance of groundwater, proliferation of microplastics…).
Appointed science “abiogenesis”which studies the origin of terrestrial life starting with inorganic matter, is based on the assumption that there is a single origin, the LUCA origin, although it may well be that there are several, and therefore it is possible that multiple transitions often cross the (boros) front within living systems (capable of reproduction) and non-living ones.
After a recent book devoted to these studies From stars to life (Cambridge University Press, 2024), by Manasvi Lingam and Amedeo Balbi, “these other temporary life forms may well have disappeared or been relegated to a dark biosphere that could not yet be exited”. Here we meet the fundamental question that you mentioned that there are other possible forms of life.
When I recorded it all, I went back to the beginning, that we all knew we were going to die. It’s no wonder that in the face of knowledge, people have come up with other options. Religions that provide for some kind of life, permanence, even more than verifiable life, are probably one of those possibilities, aided of course by what is science to be unprovable.
The “last universally known precursor” to true living organisms is called LUCA, which exists in underwater hydrothermal fumaroles.
Another alternative is the belief that in some ways the “spirit” of the person who has fallen remains “alive”. That’s what it’s called “espiritismo”It was believed that a little science was not taken into account, among them was someone as remarkable as the Briton Oliver Lodge, who, at the moment when he approached Heinrich Hertz in demonstrating the existence of electromagnetic waves, raised what he called “Lodge waves” instead of referring to “Hertzian waves”.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, there were relatively many people who provided this they could connect with the dead. The possibility that, I think I mentioned it in some of my articles, was a concern of science.
A famous case happened in 1876 when a “mental” institution was founded in London, Henry SladeHe reasoned that he could plant prayers in the spirit of his defective wife and that he would receive answers to her writings on the blackboard.
Edwin Ray Lankester (1846-1929), a zoology graduate of University College London, where he assisted Thomas Henry Huxley, known as “Darwin’s dog” for his staunch defense of the theory of the evolution of species, attended one of Slade’s sessions, always held in the dark, and was able to deal with the question, thereby confirming that the answer was written before it was written.
There is nothing more interesting here: the intention to impress like many others. What’s new in this case is that Lankester reported Slade to the police as a “common thug.” One of Slade’s defense witnesses was Alfred Russel Wallace, the coder of the theory of the evolution of species, known as an honest man.
Wallace, a follower of spiritism, I stand in for “Slade was as honest as any investigator in a university science department”. Conversely, Darwin, who was convinced that all mediums were “intelligent leaders”, wrote to Lankester that he considered the demonstration of Slade’s falsehoods a “public good”, and contributed money towards the cost of the request.
The story dictated that Slade was guilty, returning to the ancient law “against these lovers and friends,” but he didn’t finish a day in jail, and a few months later the sentence was technically overturned. Slade left England and moved first to Germany, where he met apoyos such as the physicist Johann Zöllner and convinced himself of the authenticity of his “farms”, including a local policeman.
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