[M]etabolic flux... Even a simple bacterial cell can undergo... a billion trnasformations per second... is... what being alive is. - Nick Lane

These are all lifestyles that exist in bacteria anyway. ...Photosynthesis obviously. The only eukaryotic lifestyle that does not exist at all in bacteria is ... the ability to engulf other cells, to grow around them. That's never been found yet in bacteria. It seems to require... a lot of energy, a large complicated system capable of changing shape and moving around. ...For whatever reasons it never evolved. I would say the reason was that you need mitochondria to get that large and complex in the first place.

s of some sort [lie between a hydrothermal vent system and a virus] in my mind. The trouble with viruses is that they do need a sophisticated environment to make copies of themselves. Same with selfish jumping genes, transposable elements and so on. They need to be in an environment where they can take advantage of something which is converting the environment into copies of themselves, and there's a rule... This is changing with the discovery of all these es, but as a rule you need some form of to convert the environment into copies of yourself.

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.