“I find it almost disturbing that the universe favors life this strongly” – Nick Lane

If you've got a thousand planets with life on, maybe life is going to be the same way 999 out of a thousand times because it's going to be carbon based. It's going to be water. It's going to be cells. It's going to be charges.

It's going to be hydrogen and CO2. And you're going to face the same constraints. >> If life is not only abundant, but almost inevitable. The bottleneck to not seeing aliens everywhere.

>> Well, there's probably more than one bottleneck, but ukarot is in my own mind the big one. You could have had imagine there's like Frankenstein-l like moment where things zaps alive. >> I hate I hate that as an idea. >> If I was a god-fearing person, >> I would hear this and I'd be like, "Wow, this is a vindication of intelligent design." >> I mean, I agree with you.

It it I find it a little almost disturbing. Today I'm chatting with Nick Lane who is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London and he has many books and papers which help us reconceptualize life's four billion years in terms of energy flow and helps explain everything from how life came to be in the first place to the origin of ukariats to many contingencies we see today in how life works. So Nick, maybe a good place to start would be why are ukariots so significant in your worldview of why life is the way it is. >> Well, first thanks for having me here.

This is this is fun. Uh I love talking about this kind of thing. So so ukarots, what's a ukariot? It's basically the cells that make us up, but also make up plants and make up things like amieba and fungi, algae.

So basically everything that's large and complex that you can see is composed of this one cell type called the ukareotic cell. And we have a nucleus where all the DNA is, where all the genes are, and then all this kind of machinery, cell membranes and things. There's just basically a lot of kit in in in these cells. And the weirdness is if you look inside a plant cell or a fungal cell, it looks exactly the same under an electron microscope as one of our cells.

But they have a completely different lifestyle. So why would they have ...