Nick Lane: prediction

Transcript context

…There’s no other way to solve this on the billions of planets? Because if there were another way to solve it, then what you would expect is that as soon as you get to the stage of prokaryotes that have other niches that they could colonize if only they could drive towards complexity, this would somehow be solved and then you’d have eukaryote, and then intelligence… A couple of things I’d say. Number one, there’s a thing called Orgel’s second rule, which is that evolution is cleverer than you are. Of course, I cannot say that there’s no other way that it could possibly happen. But it’s also hand-waving to say, “Oh, evolution’s so clever, the universe is so big, there’s got to be another way that it can happen.” You know, engage your brain and tell me how it’s going to work. I cannot say it’s the only way it could possibly happen. But what I’ve said is that wet, rocky planets are common. They’re everywhere. You’re going to have these same serpentinizing things. You’re going to have CO2. You’re going to have a similar biochemistry. You’re going to give rise to bacterial cells that have got a charge on their membrane. That constrains them and every example that we know on Earth where they seem to have got bigger, there’s a constraint that probabilistically happens every time. They always end up with extreme polyploidy and they don’t end up with sophisticated transport networks. So that’s not to say it’s got to happen that way every time. Maybe there’s a way around it, but it’s not an easy way around it because they haven’t done it regularly on Earth. They haven’t done it at all on Earth. The only occasion where it worked on Earth was where they came up with eukaryotes. That’s not to say it’s the only possible way of doing it. But if you try and dissect, what are the alternatives? I can’t think of any. Ok, I’m limited. But if you think there are some, then you tell me what they might be and you test them. I get this a lot, and it’s fair enough. Because if I assert to you that life’s going to be this way somewhere else in the universe… I grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek and reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I love the idea that the universe is full of all kinds of stuff as much as anybody. So I don’t like my position of saying, “Actually it’s quite limited and you’re going to see the same kinds of things elsewhere.” It’s not a position that I dreamt of having. It’s just a position that I’ve been forced into by everything that I’ve learned about life on Earth. Now, maybe I’m just wrong. But if you simply say you’re limited by your imagination, you’re wrong because you can’t think of it. Well, that’s not science anymore. Now we’re talking about just imagination and hand-waving, but it’s not science. So I’m giving reasons why probabilistically it’s going to be this way. What I would say is if you’ve got a thousand planets with life on them, maybe life is going to be the same way 999 out of a thousand times because it’s going to be carbon-based, it’s going to be water, it’s going to be cells, it’s going to be charges, it’s going to be hydrogen and CO2, and you’re going to face the same constraints. But maybe one other occasion, it’s something completely different that I never thought of and under very different conditions. ng to be hydrogen and CO2, and you’re going to face the same constraints. But maybe one other occasion, it’s something completely different that I never thought of and under very different conditions. But there’s a probabilistic thing that carbon is so common, water is so common, you are going to keep seeing the same constraints again and again.…

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