- The channel debated why natural selection has not produced cells capable of storing arbitrary, gene-regulation-independent “memories” (e.g., episodic logs or mathematical proofs) despite the apparent long-term advantage of such a capability.  
- Participants considered two possibilities: either the selective pressure is absent (because such memory is useless at the cellular level) or evolution simply has not yet reached that design point, raising the “great filter” question.  
- A concrete synthetic-biology scenario was sketched: a fanatic could engineer cells with large random-access polymer memory plus a GRN that implements a proof-checker (e.g., Metamath’s set.mm), leading to an intelligence explosion reminiscent of Greg Bear’s novel “Blood Music.”  
- The discussion extended to immune-system security: cells equipped with public-key cryptography could authenticate molecular messages, replacing today’s “wax-seal” style pattern matching and potentially becoming a prerequisite for advanced civilizations.  
- A practical electronics question was raised: whether any microcontrollers or ADCs exist with more than 50 channels, motivated by a plan to build a 100-channel EEG system inspired by Pentti Kanerva’s work on average-referenced, 100-level quantized brain-signal recording.  
- Paul Graham’s “Blub” essay and the expressive power of Lisp macros were dissected, with the caveat that macro-heavy code can incur maintainability costs that offset the theoretical succinctness advantage.