Nick Lane: prediction

Transcript context

…It’s such a fascinating theory. The thing I want to understand is what part of life the way it works now is contingent, and which would you expect to be shared even if you found life on another planet? It sounds like you’re saying that carbon, the chemical profile, is just the obvious candidate to build life on top of. Proton gradients? Is there another way you could build these chemiosmotic gradients that drive work? We have other chemistry. In principle, yes, you could use sodium ions instead of protons, but it’s very different. If you’re starting with carbon dioxide, the first thing to realize about that is that carbon is extremely good at the chemistry that it does. It’s forming very strong bonds with all kinds of molecules, so you can form complex, interesting molecules. I think of CO2 as a Lego brick that you pluck out of the air and you bind it onto something. You can build things one brick at a time that way. Then you can build really interesting complex molecules like DNA and RNA from doing that. You can’t do that with silicon. With intelligent design, you can make really complex AI robots, whatever it may be, but the whole thing requires humans to do it. But if you’re thinking about how life would start on a planet where there isn’t an intelligent designer who’s putting it all together, you need molecules that can do that chemistry, and CO2 is the outstanding example. Water is everywhere. Hydrogen, oxygen, these are all elements that are very common in the universe. So you’re going to keep on getting this same chemistry everywhere. We know that there are, from discoveries of exoplanets in recent years, if you extrapolate how many we’ve not seen yet, the number of wet rocky planets or moons in, say, the Milky Way is probably in the order of 20, 30, 40 billion of them. What fraction of them would you say have a non-eukaryotic life?…

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