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<nowiki>[</nowiki>Martin Rees] may be right. If we were to go back 5 million years, as intelligent apes, and ask ourselves "What is postbiological li… - Nick Lane
" "<nowiki>[</nowiki>Martin Rees] may be right. If we were to go back 5 million years, as intelligent apes, and ask ourselves "What is postbiological life?" I think the answer is it's not a concept that would possibly mean anything. So we've had... 4 billion years of life on earth, and it's come up with an enormous wealth and variation, but it's all organic and... the chances of it coming up with humans? I can't put a number on that. ...I don't think there's an inevitability that life, once it's started will give rise to a human-like intelligence or beyond that. I think there's nothing inevitable about it, and if we just go back a few million years on earth, there was nothing inevitable about it. So I, personally would still look for organic life, but... I'm not sure that would be the easiest thing to find. It may be that it's easier to find, yes, nano aliens or something.
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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
I deliberately avoid having... [a working definition of life]. What I quote... is... from Peter Mitchell... a pioneer... of... , that essentially all cells, with very very few exceptions, are powered by... proton gradients across the membrane. So on one side of the membrane surrounding the cell you've got the high concentration on the inside, a low proton concentration [on the outside]. Protons are... the positively charged nuclei of atoms, so... [y]ou're pumping them out and... putting a charge on the membrane... That's as universally conserved across life on earth as the itself, which implies, as a mechanism, it's very early... [I]t's not something anyone ever predicted. It's not something that... emerges from a chemical understanding of the biochemistry of cells.
I'm... interested in the principles of what governs the emergence of life on the planet, with a certain set of resources. Can we understand it? We'll never know what happened, so we'll never know how life started on earth. ...[I]f those principles are enormously difficult, if it turns out that it's a freak statistical accident, then there's little point in studying it and we will gain... very little. If, on the other hand, those principles are reasonable, intelligible, that we can study them in the lab and demonstrate that the steps that we propose are plausible and... we can demonstrate it, then I think that's as close to understanding the origin of life [as] we can get. ...[I]f those principles are generalizable, then as a scientist, that's... a pleasing thing. I'm not sure there's any more that's more pleasing to me, personally as a scientist.
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