What Nick Lane thinks about space
Biochemist at University College London, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and author of The Vital Question and Transformer.
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2 dated positions, 2022, in their own words. Our reading of what Nick Lane has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsI would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 5th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsWell, the universe is very big, but not as many as most people would like to think is my view, because the idea that there is a trajectory going from simple cellular life like bacteria, all the way through to humans, seems to me there’s some big gaps along that way, that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have is the biggest of them.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 20th of 22 in this recording