I think we share consciousness right across... not just even the animal world. I would see it going down even to the level of cells, some kind of fli… - Nick Lane

A single discovery tomorrow could disprove everything I'm saying now. That's quite thrilling. ...We have been looking for several hundred years since Leeuwenhoek and we've not found anything really shocking that falls out of the system.

It requires that life elsewhere should be modeled along similar lines to life here, which is that it should be cellular, it should be carbon-based. It should be in water. If those things are not true, then there's no reason why that numbers game would apply anywhere else. But if those things are true, then yes, I think the fact that photosynthesis only arose once, that Eucaryotes only arose once, that what Nick [Nicholas J.] Butterfield calls organ grade multicellularity, which is to say quite serious differentiation with scores of different cell types and specializations. We don't see that in fungi. We don't see that in algae. ...[Y]ou see two or three different types of cell. So that's rare. It's in plants and it's in animals. It begins to look less likely. I think it's reasonable to say it's less likely, but I wouldn't like to rely too much or put too much weight on it.

No, we're not alone [in the universe]. We share it with lots of friendly bacteria [and this includes bacteria on other planets].