Dwarkesh (host)

It would have to be like extremely, extremely tough.

So I guess the broader thing we're trying to figure out here is, if this story is true, there's life everywhere.

But eukaryotes giving rise to intelligent life, which is about to go explore the cosmos, is, as far as we can tell, happening only in one place in our light cone.

So why is that?

And now you could say, well, look, the bottleneck is the eukaryote.

And it is very hard to get a successful endosymbiosis, which then continues over time.

But what is the fundamental problem this is solving?

What's solving the problem of that?

Large genomes.

Exactly.

That's quite interesting.

The reason you need a large genome is actually just to put all your eggs in one basket so that every cell in the body feels incentivized to make the- You just restrict the amount of fighting.

Yeah, yeah.

They're all inside to make the germline continue.

But the thing I was getting at is like, okay, the eukaryote is solving large genome and it's allowing the cell to get much bigger.

Why are we so confident that this is the only way this problem could have been solved?

It just seems like if there's billions of planets which have like gotten to the precursor stage here, none of them can find an alternative solution to mitochondria for just letting themselves get bigger.

Beggar's belief.

It kind of makes me wonder whether we're like, because we've only observed one way to solve the solution, we're sort of assuming that there must be only one way to solve the problem.

Whereas the problem itself doesn't seem like, OK, you just want a smaller copy of your genome sitting next to the site of respiration, right?