- Nick Lane’s new book argues cancer is driven less by pure genetics than by age-related mitochondrial dysfunction: electron-transport-chain leakage raises ROS, triggers epigenetic re-programming, flips the Krebs cycle into reverse, and ignites the Warburg effect to supply biosynthetic carbon for tumor growth.  
- Participants debated whether the origin of life is a low-probability accident or an almost-inevitable outcome of thermodynamics; autocatalytic chemistry plus amphiphilic membranes (e.g., sodium laurate micelles) could bootstrap heritable variation long before RNA appeared.  
- Life was framed as a literal heat engine: cells, hurricanes, and even corporations are gradient-dissipating structures whose complexity scales with available negentropy, illustrating why eukaryotes required the Great Oxygenation Event’s large redox potential.  
- A practical thread explored ultra-cheap 900 MHz UHF RFID for sub-meter warehouse localization: $0.05 passive tags, $50–$1000 readers, and DIY trilateration; FellowAI’s mapping robot was cited as prior art.  
- Brown dwarfs such as WISE 0855−0714 (225–260 K) and cold exoplanet oceans were suggested as plausible crucibles for complex organic chemistry and alternative biospheres.  
- The conversation closed with the observation that LUCA has erased nearly all traces of simpler pre-cellular chemistries, making the evolutionary path from small molecules to VLSI-like biological complexity as opaque to us as semiconductor fabs would be to a future AI archaeologist.