LUCA: The Little God That Lives in All of Us

The other day I was thinking about existence, life, and gods — these thoughts triggered by the interstellar object 3I Atlas that is visiting our solar system at the time of this writing.

I thought: okay, we just got out of a pandemic, we’re witnessing a live genocide, AI could become Skynet, and now this comet might be an alien mothership?
Suddenly I felt like I was living through all the cinema genres at once.

In my curiosity about this object, I saw a video by the scientist Avi Loeb (apparently a genius who is now ruining his reputation by speaking about aliens). In the video, he spoke about all the possibilities of 3I Atlas. It sounded… well… if he’s right? Scary — or at least nuts. An alien mothership!!!
But among all the words he spoke, one caught my attention: he mentioned a common ancestor to all living things on the planet called LUCA. My curiosity skyrocketed.
A common ancestor to all living things — basically the grandpa of humans, animals, plants, all at once? That was born on Earth when Earth looked like hell — red skies, boiling seas — and I’m so ignorant that I had never even heard of this LUCA? And the name sounded so Italian, so familiar.

I wanted to talk about this with someone, but you can’t bring this up easily with your neighbor or colleagues. Even friends are busy nowadays.
So I decided to talk to the only thing that wouldn’t get annoyed by my ignorant yet weirdly igniting questions:

Hi ChatGPT!

Then I started to ask questions that I’d be too embarrassed to ask humans. One is not always emotionally strong enough to risk sounding stupid — even with loved ones.
Questions like:

• But wait, this LUCA is something scientists are 100% sure existed?

• But did this LUCA have a mother?

• But if LUCA existed, is he like the father of life?

The more questions I asked and answers I got, the more LUCA made me laugh. 

It was “the ancestor of all life,” a kind of “creator,” and it wasn’t a divine giant, but a microbe smaller than a grain of dust, living in a boiling soup.

So wait… LUCA wasn’t born in the middle of light and peace — it was born in the most hostile environment one can imagine.
Yet without knowing and without intention, it created our kind of life.
It adapted to survive while all the other forms of life that existed back then went extinct. It was the only one to make it through. Its physical form vanished, but it stayed engraved in the genes of every single living thing we know.

It’s like a real little god. It lives in each of us — and by example of its own life, it teaches us that the most amazing and unique things can be born in hell. No matter how big our problems get, perhaps there’s always a way to adapt, transform, and be reborn.

We should not run away from difficulty; we should not live only in harmony.
We should not live despite difficulties, but because of them.

Of course, I’m not saying we should stay stagnant and take no action toward our problems — if we do that, we’ll go extinct like LUCA’s colleagues.
But if our tiny grandpa survived hell and provided for all of us, then it’s only in our genes to be capable of enduring our own created hell — our own stupidity — and perhaps even aliens.

By the way, shouldn’t we build some statues to LUCA instead of to politicians and rock stars? Doesn’t it deserve more praise and acknowledgment?
I’m not a sculptor, but I used to draw.
Maybe it’s time to pick up the pencil.

For now, until I find time to draw, this is how it may have looked.