Nick Lane

Now, maybe I'm just wrong, but I suppose if you simply say, ah, you're limited by your imagination, you're wrong because you just can't think of it.

Well, that's not science anymore.

Now we're talking about...

just imagination and hand-waving, but it's not science.

So I'm giving reasons why probabilistically it's going to be this way.

What I would say is if you've got a thousand planets with life on, maybe life is going to be the same way 999 out of a thousand times because it's going to be carbon-based, it's going to be water, it's going to be cells, it's going to be charges, it's going to be hydrogen and CO2, and you're going to face the same constraints.

But maybe one other occasion, it's something completely different that I never thought of and under very different conditions.

But there's a kind of a probabilistic thing that, you know, carbon is so common, water is so common.

You are going to keep seeing the same constraints again and again.

It may take us a while.

But yeah, we already know that there are organics.

So on Enceladus, for example, one of the moons of Saturn, when Cassini flew by years ago, there are kind of plumes there.

coming through cracks in the ice of water, but with organics dissolved in the water.

And hydrogen and organic molecules, pH is around about eight or nine or something.

So it implies that underneath that frozen surface, which people say is about five kilometers thick, underneath that, there's a liquid ocean.

Underneath that, there are hydrothermal systems producing alkaline fluids, which is

made the oceans alkaline, and it's the same kind of chemistry going on.

So we know there's organics in these plumes.

We don't know what's under the ice.

I do think that the incentives to go to these places and drill into the ice and have a look will get the better of us.