[T]here's a limit to just how far vents can take you... but... once you've gotten as far as , then you've freed yourself from a fairly small energy f… - Nick Lane

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

We all share this basic machinery in cells, and it's not related to whether you're photosynthetic or whether you're phagocytes or whether you are a fungus or whether you're an animal cell. We all share the same machinery. Why? The possibility is that it's not about adaptation to the external world, it's about adaptation to these s. These pesky bacteria that went on to become a mitochondria. Maybe this conflict of interest... [that] had to be resolved somehow was what was driving a lot the elaboration of cellular machinery. It's a kind of local... intimate conflict.

Whether or not it would be possible to drive the kind of protein machinery that you see in modern cells, like an ... that makes the energy currency of life... If it were just sitting there in a in a vent, can work out whether the natural... ion gradients in these vents would be... powerful enough to drive this machine to work. ...[Y]ou need to know what are the substrates, what are... the materials that it needs to operate? Where are they coming from? What's the concentration of them? You realize that you have no answer to any of those, and then what's the product? Well, it disappears off somewhere else, as well. So how can selection act if you've got stuff coming in from some unknown place and the product leaving to some unknown place? It made me realize that cellularization is important as a way of keeping the inside in and in keeping the outside out, and so I now have problems with the idea of seeing the entire vent as a kind of a living system.