4min chapter

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas cover image

198 | Nick Lane on Powering Biology

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

CHAPTER

Exploring the Foundations of Life Through Chemical Reactions

This chapter explores the principles of energy conservation and release in chemical reactions, emphasizing the impact of environmental factors like acidity and alkalinity. It draws parallels between these reactions and biological processes, suggesting that Earth's geological structures may reflect cellular arrangements, hinting at the origins of life in hydrothermal settings.

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This
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episode of Mindscape is sponsored by BetterHelp. When it comes to relationships, we often hear about the red flags we should avoid. But what if we focus more on looking for the green flags in friends and partners? If you're not sure what green flags look like, therapy can help you identify them, actively practice them in your relationships, and embody the green flag energy yourself. Whether you're dating, married, building a friendship, or just working on yourself, semiconductors it's time to form relationships that love you back. One of the great things about therapy is by looking inside yourself, you can both learn to take those warning signs seriously, but also learn to be open to new experiences and new things, to know when something be worth pursuing. BetterHelp is a fully online service that makes therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide. You can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. So discover your relationship green flags with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/Mindscape today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E dot com slash Mindscape. Okay, let me see if I can reconstruct what's going on here because it does sound, it makes sense when you say it. So we have all this energy locked up in CO2 and hydrogen. But you just put them in a little bucket and they don't react. They're too stable. They're too happy all by themselves. But if we can segregate them a little bit and put one in an acidic environment and one in an alkaline environment, then they become much more ready to release their energy, to react in the right way, to let that energy go. And so you need that kind of separation, a kind of barrier, a kind of membrane. You need acid and alkaline and you need a proton gradient, as you said. And then the idea would be, I suppose, that these reactions that have been enabled by this simple setup keep going and maybe grow and become more sophisticated as they go from being some inorganic chemistry to being life? Yes.
Speaker 1
All I'm really trying to do is preserve the same topology as a cell. So what you have in these vents is really a labyrinth of pores, cell-like pores, with a thin inorganic barrier surrounding them. And at least in my imagination, a lot of these are down at the bottom of the ocean and not easy to get at. But we can do experiments in the lab using microfluidic chips and things like that and show that this kind of thing is at least possible. That on the inside of the pore, you have your alkaline fluids. On the outside, you have your acidic fluids. And the barrier between the two, let's say there's electrons or protons, can cross that barrier, and that's been shown to happen, which means you have separate phases. Mike Russell uses the phrase frustration. The mixing is frustrated. It's slowed down. But it happens anyway. But the rate at which the fluids are replenished with hydrothermal flow or ocean waters percolating in is faster, if you like, than the rate of mixing is. And so you've constantly kept your two phases. So the planet is doing the work. It's really, it's gravity in the end that takes the iron down and puts the hydrogen coming from the earth and the CO2. So the planet is a giant battery. It's like a giant cell where the inside is alkaline relative to the outside. And the way that the topology of cells is very similar to the topology of the planet and the way that they function is very similar to at a micro level what you're seeing inside these vents. But it's a beautiful idea that really cells mimic the structure of the planet.

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