Nick Lane

There will always be people saying, oh, we shouldn't introduce bacteria from our own system into there.

I would have said bacteria from the earth would probably survive extremely well in a place like Enceladus.

So it would be lovely to know, yes.

And I'm all in favor, really, of exploration.

Yeah.

what I would call protocells inside these pores.

So you think that the organics that you're making are self-organizing.

A fatty acid bilayer membrane will form.

And what you really need for positive feedbacks is to be making the organics inside this protocell and for that protocell to grow and to make a copy of itself.

Now, it will make a copy of itself because the chemistry, if the chemistry is deterministic, it says this is the chemistry you're going to get.

If you drive that chemistry through by the pressure of hydrogen in the system, you're just going to make twice as many molecules and they're going to divide in two and now you've got two protocells.

So there's a form of heredity to that, which is they get the same molecules because that's effectively all you're allowed to do.

I would hesitate to use the word replicator here.

These are growing, I would say, growing protocells that are effectively...

making more of themselves.

You could call it a replicator, but I would prefer to use the word replicator for something more like RNA, which would be the conventional term for a replicator, where you are literally replicating the exact sequence of this RNA.

The sooner the better, which is to say, if you've got this deterministic chemistry, which is going to drive growth and make more cells,

it's also a dead end.

You can't do anything else.

You're entirely dependent on the environment.