Dwarkesh (host)

Right.

So if there's 20, 30 billion Earth-like planets, which have presumably some big fraction of them have these vents, if they all have these rock formations.

So like, is there a view that a notable fraction of them have life that also operates?

Sorry, this is a naive question, but what is the reason to think that there's no alternative chemistries which lead to alternative metabolisms?

So 20 billion Earth-like planets with water and these rocks in- Not necessarily Earth-like, but wet and rocky.

If you just had to pull a number out of nowhere and just say, this fraction have nucleotides, what fraction would you say?

Again, I know we're just chatting here, but according to this story, pretty sophisticated organics are extremely abundant through the universe, right?

Yeah, I guess you could have prokaryotes then who did just take over.

I mean, we did have this, right?

We kind of proliferated through the oceans and changed the composition of the atmosphere.

So your view is that the fundamental bottleneck to that, if eukaryotes are the fundamental bottleneck,

You can go from geochemistry to early life is easy, early life to just changing the entire composition of the Earth through early prokaryotes is easy.

And if those two things are easy, and then you've got 10 billion planets in the Milky Way that have gone to the middle step, does it imply that there's on the order of 10 billion planets?

I see.

And what fraction would you, again, you had to pull a number out of the air.

So this happens to be the 101st episode of the Thorkesh podcast.

And obviously that doesn't include, you know, clips and shorts and the other content that we put out on the channel.

So at this point, it's gotten a bit tough to keep track of all of this data.

But since Google Sheets has Gemini built in, I was able to just throw our channel data into a sheet and ask Gemini whatever questions that I wanted answered.

For example, it's hard to evaluate patterns for our full episodes, given that some of the clips were in the same channel.