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Does anyone care if there's an awful waste of space? It's a form of wishful thinking... We would love for the Universe to be full. ...Personally, I g… - Nick Lane
" "Does anyone care if there's an awful waste of space? It's a form of wishful thinking... We would love for the Universe to be full. ...Personally, I grew up on the Hichiker's Guide to the Universe, those kind of crazy science fiction yarns, or Star Wars or whatever it may be. The idea that the Universe is full of other intelligent beings, all kind of finding a way of getting along or having a war, but having some heroism thrown in, but... it's all human vision of ourselves thrown onto a cosmic scale. Do I believe any of it? No... Is there anything that I think, from my understanding as a biologist, that would tend to lead to that? No... Does it matter if it's a tremendous waste of space? Well, that's to say "What's the point of the Big Bang?" I don't know. The idea that the Universe may be completely empty apart from matter and energy? It would seem to be, perhaps, the default hypothesis. The fact that we find life is surprising. It would be nice if there were laws of the Universe that tended to give rise to life. Maybe there are at the level of bacteria. I don't see it at the level of large, morphologically complex beings... I think it's emotive. It's pleasing, but I doubt it's true.
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About Nick Lane
(born 1967) is a British and writer. He is a professor in evolutionary at University College London. He has published five books to date which have won several awards.
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Additional quotes by Nick Lane
What does life do then? ...it seems reasonable that the earliest forms of life were ic... [i.e.,] they grew from gases... found in normal geological environments through an energy flux which is equivalent to cells which we see today, which is to say, what all life does today. There's a very simple phrase from Mike Russell... "hydrogenate CO<sub>2</sub>"... [i.e.,] add onto to make organic molecules. That is the structure of in cells, and different cells can get hydrogen from all kinds places. They can strip it out of water. They can get it from , but it also comes bubbling out of the ground as hydrogen gas, and that seems to be the simplest form of life imaginable as... life on earth. It's reacting hydrogen and CO<sub>2</sub>, and they don't react easily. The way that cells make them react... is to effectively use an electrical charge on a ... [T]here are environments like deep sea s that provide... for free with an equivalent electrical charge across a barrier, and I think... that's the way to see the question.
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I would say that if there's a probability of life being cellular, which I think there is. Life being based, which I think there is. Life starting out with CO<sub>2</sub> because it's so common in planetary atmospheres, and , which is very common, from the kind of s which I'm talking about... and liquid water. They need liquid water for , but we know of it on ... on Europa... [Serpentinization] is giving rise to alkaline fluids with hydrogen gas. Most hydrogen gas you find in planetary atmosphere are coming from serpentinization. , which is the mineral required for that... is ubiquitous in interstellar dust... So all of this pushes you down a certain avenue, and if that's correct it gives you bacteria... and if that's correct then bacteria have a structural problem, and they're not going to get beyond bacteria except with an endosymbiosis, and that in itself is improbable, unlikely... because it only happened once, to our knowledge, on earth.
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