George Church

But in any case, we need to look at those fountains to see what's popping up.

That's a high priority.

And the same thing goes for, there's a lot of water on Mars that's maybe even more accessible.

But until we've exhausted those, those are probably the easiest.

They're hard.

We're still talking about multi-billion dollar experiments, but I think they're a little more convincing.

And again, it'll be hard to prove the negative.

If we find it's negative on everything in the solar system,

you know, there's so much more diversity out there that could have done it.

I don't think I'd be surprised either way.

I can imagine it going either way.

I can imagine making truly amazing materials

using proteins as the catalysts, or maybe in some cases as a scaffold as well as catalysts.

I think one thing that's probably already happening, so we don't have to go a thousand years out, is the number of amino acids is going up.

It's going up radically from 20.

I think pretty soon we'll have a system where we can have 33, 34 new non-standard amino acids being used simultaneously with all the standard ones in a E. coli cell.

So 34...

plus 20 is a lot bigger than 20.

I don't think we necessarily need more

more than four nucleic acid components.