Dwarkesh (host)

And then the story is basically that

You make very simple organics with CO2 and H2, and then those simple organics are then recatalyzed to make more and more complex organics, and basically TLDR metabolism, and fatty acids and nucleotides and everything else.

Then if you make fatty acids, they will sort of spontaneously, because of the hydrophilic nature of their different sides, they will spontaneously form the membrane if they're created.

You could have had, imagine that life is this like, there's like Frankenstein-like moment where things zaps alive and then now you've got life.

Yeah, so that's the alternative where like the bolt of lightning makes these organics, et cetera.

And here you have this story where...

every life form you see is continuous with something which is continuous with something.

Yes.

Which is eventually just continuous with entirely spontaneous chemical reactions.

And so that's just a very interesting way to think about the evolution of life.

Yeah, 100%.

So just basically you've got Earth as this sort of like giant cell and then this like from the hydrothermal vent, this little bubble pops up.

Yeah, it's such a fascinating theory.

So 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?

So it sounds like you're saying, look, carbon, the chemical profile, this is just the obvious candidate to build life on top of.

Proton gradients, is there another way you could build this sort of chemiosmotic gradients that drive work, right?

Like, we have other chemistries for batteries.

What fraction of them would you expect to have a non-eukaryotic life?

Even the vents are not contingent.