Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318

Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic. Which is to say, they release energy. This- if you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to, say, 50 degrees centigrade, and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing is gonna happen. But thermodynamically, that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. Why doesn't that happen is because of the kinetic barriers. It's becau- that's why you need the spark.

The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written. Including his two most recent titled Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way It Is? This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane. Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious, the most interesting question that, uh, we little humans can ask of ourselves. How did life originate on Earth?

You could, you could ask anybody working on the subject and you'll get a different answer from all of them. They will be passionately held opinions. And they're opinions grounded in science, um, but they're still really at this point, they're opinions. Because there's so much stuff to know, um, that all we can ever do is get a kind of a small slice of it, and it's the context which matters. So I can give you my answer. My answer is from a biologist's point of view. That has been missing from the equation over decades, which is, well, what does life do on Earth? What, what, why is it this way? Why is it made of cells? Why is it made of carbon? Uh, why does it, why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes? There's all these interesting questions about cells that if you then look to see, well, is there an environment on Earth, on the early Earth 4 billion years ago, that kind of matches the requirements of cells? Well, there is one. There's a very obvious one, it's basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents, uh, which generate, um, hydrogen gas in bucket loads, and electrical charges on kind of cell-like pores, uh, that can, that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does. So it seems so beautiful and so, so obvious, um, that I've spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments. It turns out to be difficult of course. Everything's more difficult than you ever thought it was going to be. But it looks, I would say, more true rather than less true over that 10-year period. I think I, I have to take a step back every now and then and think, "Hang on a minute, where is this going?" Uh, I, I'm happy it's going in a sensible direction. Uh, and, and I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas. I mean, I'm often accused of being too focused on life on Earth, too kind of narrow minded and inward looking, you might say. I, I'm, I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells, and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me, "Ah, yeah. But life can be anything. I have no imagination." And maybe they're right. But unless we can say why life here is this way, and if those reasons are fundamental reasons or if they're just trivial reasons, then we can't answer that question. Um, so, so I think they're fundamental reasons, and I think we need to worry about them.