Nick Lane

They're everywhere.

You're going to have these same serpentinizing things.

You're going to have CO2.

You're going to have a similar biochemistry.

You're going to give rise to bacterial cells that have got a charge on their membrane.

That constrains them.

And every example that we know on Earth where they seem to have got bigger, there's a constraint that probabilistically happens every time.

They always end up with extreme polyploidy and they don't end up with sophisticated transport networks.

So that's not to say it's got to happen that way every time.

Maybe there's a way around it, but it's not an easy way around it because they haven't done it regularly on Earth.

They haven't done it at all on Earth.

The only occasion where it worked on Earth was where they came up with eukaryotes.

That's not to say it's the only possible way of doing it, but if you try and dissect what are the alternatives, I can't think of any alternatives.

Okay, I'm limited.

I can't think of any.

But, you know, if you think there are some, then you tell me what they might be and you test them.

So, you know, there's a level, and I get this a lot, and it's fair enough, because if I assert to you that life's going to be this way somewhere else in the universe, and, you know, I grew up watching, you know, Star Wars and Star Trek and reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I love the idea that the universe is full of all kinds of stuff as much as anybody.

my position of saying, actually, it's quite limited and you're going to see the same kind of things elsewhere.

It's not a position that I dreamt of having or anything.

It's just a position that I've been forced into by everything that I've learned about life on earth.