Viruses are quite sophisticated in the sense that they're forming virion particles and they're infecting other cells... s and things... selfish genes… - Nick Lane

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.

The possessors of... nuclei, the s, are the most important cells in the world. ...[A]ll plants and animals, all and fungi... essentially everything we can see with the naked eye, is composed of [them]...

It could be any of those <nowiki>[</nowiki>sodium, or other ion gradients]. The fact of life on earth is that it tends to use proton gradients, and we know particular environments that do use proton gradients, and the reason I think protons is because , which is to say the proton concentration, can modulate the reactivity of both and . Now sodium concentrations wouldn't do that, but protons, if you've got gas in alkaline fluids, hydrothermal fluids... what you've got coming out of these s, hydrogen is more reactive in alkaline conditions. It really doesn't want to push its electrons onto something else, but if it's in alkaline conditions it pushes its electrons onto something else, and the protons are left behind and they will react immediately with the hydroxide ions to form water, which is thermodynamically very favored, and so it's far more likely to push its electrons onto CO₂ if it's in alkaline solution.