Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with lee
cronin a chemist from university of
glasgow who's one of the most
fascinating brilliant out-of-the-box
thinking scientists i've ever spoken to
this episode was recorded more than two
weeks ago so the war in ukraine is not
mentioned
i have been spending a lot of time each
day talking to people in ukraine and
russia
i have family friends colleagues and
loved ones
in both countries
i will try to release a solo episode on
this war but i've been failing to find
the words that make sense of it for
myself
and others
so i may not
i ask for your understanding no matter
which path i take
most of my time is spent trying to help
as much as i can privately
i'm talking to people who are suffering
who are angry afraid
when i returned to this conversation
with lee
i couldn't help but smile
he's a beautiful brilliant and hilarious
human being
he's basically a human manifestation of
the mad scientist rig sanchez from rick
and morty
i thought about quitting this podcast
for a time
but for now at least i'll keep going
i love people too much
you the listener
i meet folks on the street or when i run
you say a few kind words about the
podcast and we talk about life the small
things and the big things
all of it gives me hope
people are just amazing you are amazing
i ask for your support wisdom and
patience as i keep going
with this silly little podcast
including through some difficult
conversations
and hopefully
many fascinating and fun ones too
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here's lee
cronin
how do you think life originated on
earth and what insights does that give
us about life
if we go back to the origin of earth and
you think about maybe 4.7 4.6 4.5
billion years ago planet was quite hot
there was a limited number of minerals
there was some carbon some water and i
think that maybe it's a really simple
set of chemistry that we we really don't
understand
so that means you've got a finite number
of elements that are going to react very
simply with one another
and out of that mess comes a cell so
literally sand turns into cells and it
seems to happen quick
so what i think i can say with some
degree of
i think not certainty but curiosity
genuine curiosity is that life happened
fast yeah so when we say fast
this is a pretty surprising
fact and maybe you can actually correct
me and elaborate but it seems like most
like 70 or 80 percent of the time that
earth has been around there's been life
on it like some very significant
percentage so when you say fast like the
slow part is from single cell
or from bacteria to some more
complicated organism it seems like most
of the time that earth has been around
it's been single cell
or like very basic organisms like a
couple billion years but yeah you're
right that that's really i recently kind
of revisited
our history and saw this
and
i was just looking at the timeline wait
a minute like how did life just spring
up so quickly like really quickly that
makes me think
that it really wanted to like
put another way it's very easy for life
to spring yeah i agree i think it's much
more inevitable and i think um i try to
kind of not provoke but try and push
chemists to think about because chemists
are part are central to this problem
right
of understanding the origin of life on
earth at least because we're made of
made of chemistry but i wonder if the
origin of life
on a planet or so the emergence of life
on the planet is as
common as the formation of a star
and if you start framing it in that way
it allows you to then look at the
universe slightly differently because
um and we can get into this i think in
quite some detail but i think i to to
come back to your question i have
little idea of how life got started but
i know it was simple
and i know that the process of selection
had to occur before
the biology was established so that
selection
built the framework from which life
kind of grew in complexity and
capability and functionality and
autonomy and i think these are all
really important words that we can
unpack over the next
while can you say all the words again so
he says selection
so natural selection
eight the original a b testing and so
and then complexity
and then or the degree of autonomy and
sophistication because i think that
people misunderstand what life is um
some people say that life is a cell and
some people that say that life is a
a virus or life is a you know an on off
switch
i don't think it's that life is the
universe developing a memory
and the laws of physics and the way well
there are no laws of physics physics is
just memory free stuff
right
there's only a finite number of ways you
can arrange the fundamental particles to
do the things life is the universe
developing
a memory so it's like
sewing
a piece of art slowly
and then you can look back at it so
so there's a stickiness to life it's
like universe doing stuff
and when you say memory it's like
there's a stickiness to a bunch of the
stuff that's building together yeah so
like you can
in a stable way like uh
trace back the complexity
and that tells a coherent story yeah and
i think yeah okay
that's by the way very poetic
and beautiful
life is the universe developing a memory
[Music]
okay and then there's autonomy you said
complexity we'll talk about but
it's a really interesting idea that
selection preceded biology
yeah i think yes so what first of all
what is chemistry
like does sand still count as chemistry
sure i mean as a chemist they can't
carry a chemist if i'm allowed a card i
don't know i don't know what i am most
days what is the card made of
what's the chemical composition of the
card
yeah so um what is chemistry well
chemistry is the thing that happens when
you bring electrons together and you
form bonds
so bonds well i say to people when they
talk about life elsewhere
and i just say well there's bonds
there's hope because bonds allow you to
get heterogeneity they allow you to
record those memories or at least on
earth um you could imagine uh
you know a stannis left lemtrey world
where you might have life emerging or
intelligence emerging before life that
may be something to on like solaris or
something but you know to get to
selection if you can form if atoms can
combine and form bonds
those bonds uh those atoms can bond to
different elements and those and those
molecules
will have different identities and
interact with each other differently and
then you can start to have some degree
of causation or interaction
and then selection and then put and then
existence
and then you you you go you go up the
kind of the path of complexity and so at
least on earth
as we know it there are there is a
sufficient pool of
available chemicals to start create
searching that combinatorial space of
bonds
so okay this is a really interesting
question let's let's lay it out so bonds
almost like cards we say there's bonds
there is uh
life there's intelligence there's
consciousness and what you just made me
realize
is um
those can emerge or let's put bonds
aside uh those can emerge in any order
that's that's really brilliant so
intelligence can come before life it's
like
pan psychists believe that consciousness
com i guess comes before
life
and before intelligence
so consciousness like permeates all
matter it's some kind of fabric of
reality okay so like within this
framework you can kind of arrange
everything but you need to have the
bonds
um that's precedes everything else oh
and the other thing is selection
so like the mechanism of selection
that could
uh proceed see couldn't that proceed
bonds to whatever the house election so
i would say that there is an elegant
order to it that bonds
allow selection allows the emergence of
life allows the emergence of
multicellularity and then
more information processing building
state machines all the way up however
you could imagine a situation if you had
um i don't know a neutron star or a sun
or a ferromagnetic loops interacting
with one another
and these oscillators building state
machines and these state machines
reading something out in the environment
over time these state machines would be
able to
literally record what happened in the
past and sense what's going on in the
present and imagine the future however i
don't think it's ever going to be with
within a human comprehension that type
of life
um i wouldn't count it out because um
you know whenever you i know in science
whenever i say something's impossible i
then wake up the next day and say no
that's actually wrong i mean there are
there are some limits of course um i
don't see myself traveling fast and
light any time soon but eric weinstein
says that's possible so he will say
europe sure but i'm an experimentalist
as well so one of my i have two super
powers and my
stupidity and i don't mean that is a you
know i'm like absolutely completely
witless but i mean my ability to kind of
just start again and ask the question
and then do it with an experiment i
always wanted to be a theoretician
growing up but i just didn't have the
just didn't have the intellectual
capability but i i was able to think of
experiments in my head i could then do
in my lab or in that you know when i was
a with a child
outside and then those experiments in my
head and then outside reinforce one
another so i think that's a very good
way of kind of
grounding the science right well that's
the nice way to think about
theoreticians is they're just
people who run experiments in their head
i mean that's exactly what einstein did
right and but you were also capable of
doing that in the head
in your head inside your head and in the
real world and the connection between
the two
is when you first discovered your
superpower stupidity
i like it okay what's your second
superpower oh your accent or
it's that well i don't know i'm my i
like i am genuinely curious so my
curious so i have a you know like
everybody ego problems but my curiosity
is bigger than my ego so as long as that
happens i i can i can that's awesome
that is so powerful you're just dropping
some powerful lines so curiosity
is bigger than ego that's something i
have to think about because you always
struggle about the role of ego in life
and
um
that's
that's so nice to think about
don't think about the size of ego the
absolute size of ego think about the
relative size of ego to the other the
other horses pulling at you and if the
curiosity one is bigger then uh ego will
do just fine and make you uh fun to talk
to anyway so those are the two
superpowers how do those connect to
natural selection or in selection and
bonds and
i forgot already life and consciousness
so that we're going back to selection in
the universe and origin of life on earth
i mean um selection has a for i'm
convinced that selection is a force in
the universe not me not a fundamental
force but a but a directing but it is a
directing force because existence
although
um existence appears to be the default
um the existence of what why does
um we can get to this later i think but
it's amazing that
the discreet things exist
and you know you see this cup it's not
the you know sexiest cup in the world
but it's pretty functional this cup um
the complexity of this cup isn't just in
the object it is literally the lineage
of people making cups and recognizing
that seeing that in their head making an
abstraction of a cup and then making a
different one
so
i wonder how many billions of cups
have you know come before this one and
that's the process of selection and
existence and the only reason the cup is
still used is quite useful i like the
handle you know it's convenient so i
don't die i keep hydration um and so
i think we are missing something
fundamental in the universe about
selection and i think what biology is is
a is a selection
amplifier
and that the this is where autonomy
comes in and actually i think that how
humanity is going to humans and
and autonomous robots or whatever we're
going to call them in the future we'll
we'll supercharge that even further so
selection is happening in the universe
but if you look in the asteroid belt
selection if objects are being kicked in
and out the asteroid belt um those
trajectories are quite complex you don't
really look at that as productive
selection because it's not doing
anything to improve its function but is
it the
asteroid belt has existed for some time
so there is some selection going on but
the functionality is is somewhat limited
on earth
at the formation of earth
interaction of chemicals and molecules
in the environment gave selection and
then things could happen because you
could think about in chemistry we could
have an infinite number of reactions
happen but they don't all all the
reactions are allowed to happen don't
happen why because they're energy
barriers
so
there must be some things called
catalysts out there or
there are bits of minerals that when two
molecules get together in that mineral
it lowers the energy barrier for the
reaction and so the reaction is is
promoted so suddenly you get one
reaction over another
series of possibilities occurring that
makes a particular molecule and this
keeps happening in steps and before you
know it these almost these waves as
discrete reactions work together and you
start to build
a machinery
that that that is run by existence
so
as you you go forward in time the fact
that the molecules
the bonds are getting there are more
bonds in a molecule there's more
function there's more capability for
this molecule to interact with other
molecules to redirect them it's like a
series of little and i don't want to use
this term
too much but it's almost thinking about
the the simplest von neumann constructor
that's the simplest molecule that could
build a more complicated molecule to
build a more complicated molecule and
before you know it when that more
complicated molecule can act on the
causal chain that's produced itself
and change it suddenly you start to get
towards some kind of autonomy and that's
where life i think emerges in earnest
every single word in in the past few
paragraphs let's uh break those apart
but
uh who's von neumann what's the
constructor
the closing of the loop that you're
talking about
uh the the molecule that starts becoming
the i think you said like the smallest
flying neumann constructor yeah the
smallest the minimal so uh what do all
those things mean and what is uh
uh what are we supposed to imagine when
we think about the smallest uh violent
constructor so
john von neumann is a real hero actually
if not just me but many people i think
computer science and and physics
he was an incredible intellect
he probably solved a lot of the problems
that we're working on today and just
forgot to write them down yeah
and
i'm not sure if it's john von neumann or
johnny as i think his friends called him
but as um
i think he was hungarian
mathematician came to the us
and um basically got was involved in the
manhattan project and developing
computation
and um came up with all sorts of ideas
and i think it was one of the first
people to come come up with cellular
automata
and but he really i didn't know this
little fact i think i think so and i
think well anyway if he didn't come up
with it he probably did come up with and
didn't write it down there was a couple
of people did at the same time and then
conway obviously took it on and then
wolfram
loves cas there is his fabric of the
universe
and what i think he imagined was that
he wasn't satisfied and this may be
incorrect recollection but there's so a
lot of what i say is going to be kind of
you know
just way out of my uh
you're just part of the universe
um creating its memory designing exactly
yeah rewriting history rewriting exactly
imperfectly so but what i mean is i
think he he would he liked this idea of
thinking about
um
how could a
turing machine literally build itself
without a turing machine right it's like
literally how did state machines emerge
and i think that von neumann
constructors he was wanted to conceive
of a minimal thing
autonomous
that could build itself and what would
those rules look like in the world and
that's what a von neumann kind of
constructor looked like like it's a
minimal hypothetical object that could
build itself self-replicate
and um
and i'm really fascinated by that
because i think that
um although it's probably not
exactly what happened
um it's a nice model because as chemists
if we could go back to the origin of
life and think about what is a minimal
machine
that can get structured randomly so like
with no prime mover we've no we've no no
architect
and it assembles through just existence
so random stuff bumping in together and
you make this first molecule so you have
molecule a
and molecule a um interacts with another
random molecule b and they get together
and they realize by working together
they can make more of themselves
but then they realize they can mutate so
they can make a b prime so a b prime is
different to a b
and then a b prime
can then act back where a and b were
being created and slightly nudge that
causal chain
and
make a b prime
more
um evolvable or learn more so that's the
closing the loop part closing the loop
part got it it feels like the mutation
part
is um
not that difficult it feels like the
difficult part is just creating a copy
of yourself that's step one it seems uh
um
that seems like one of the greatest
inventions in the history of the
universe is the
the first molecule they figured out holy
i can create a copy of myself
how
hard is that i think it's really really
easy
okay i did not expect that i think it's
really really easy well let's take a
step back
i think replication replicating
molecules are rare but if you say you
know i think i was saying on i probably
got into trouble on twitter the other
day so i was trying to write this
there's about more than 18 mils of water
in there so one mole of water 6.022
times 10 to the 23
molecules that's about the number of
stars in the universe i think of the
order so there's three universe worth
but between somebody corrected you on
twitter yeah i'm as if i've always been
corrected it's a great fact but but
there's a lot of molecules in the water
yeah and so and so there's a lot of so
although it's for you and me really hard
to conceive of if existence is not
the default for a long period of time
because what happens is the molecules
get degraded so so much of the
possibilities in the universe are just
broken back into atoms so you have this
this kind of
destruction of the molecules for our
chemical reactions
so you only need one or two molecules to
become good at copying themselves for
them suddenly to then take resources in
the pool and start to grow and so then
replication actually over time when you
have bonds i think is
much simpler and much easier
and i even found this in my lab years
ago i had one of the reasons i started
doing inorganic chemistry and making
rust making a bit of rust based on a
thing called molybdenum military oxide
is this molybdenum oxide
it's very simple
but when you add acid to it and some
electrons they make these molecules you
just cannot possibly imagine um would be
constructed big gigantic wheels of 154
molybdenum atoms in a wheel or i cost a
dodecahedron 132 molybdenum atoms all in
the same pot and i realized when i and i
just finished experiments two years ago
i've just published a couple of papers
on this that they're actually
there is a random small molecule with 12
atoms in it that can form randomly but
it happens to template its own
production
and then by chance it templates the ring
just an accident just like just an
absolute accident and that ring also
helps make
the small
12 mer and so you have what's called an
auto catalytic set
where a
makes b
and b helps make a
and and vice versa and you then make
this loop so it's a bit like um
these they all work in in synergy to
make this chain of events that grow
and it doesn't take um a very
sophisticated model to show that
if you have these objects are competing
and then collaborating to help one
another build they just grow out of the
mess and although they seem improbable
they are improbable in fact impossible
in one step
there's multiple steps this is when the
blind people look at the blind
watchmaker argument when you talk about
how could a watch something
spontaneously emerge well it doesn't
it's a lineage of watchers and cruder
devices that that that couple are
bootstrapped onto one another
right
uh
so it's very improbable but once you get
that little discovery like with the
wheel
and um
fire it just gets
explodes in because it's so successful
it explodes it's basically
selection so this templating mechanism
that allows you to have a little like
blueprint for yourself how you go
through different procedures is to build
copies of yourself
so i uh in chemistry somehow it's
possible to imagine that that kind of
thing
is easy to spring up
in more complex organisms it feels like
a different thing and much more
complicated like
we're having like uh
multiple abstractions of the birds and
the bees conversation here but with with
human inside with complex organisms it
feels like difficult to have
reproduction
uh
to uh
that's gonna get clipped out i'm gonna
make fun of that um
uh it's still it's difficult to develop
this idea of making copies of yourself
or no
uh because that seems like a magical
idea for life
to uh
wow
that feels like very necessary for what
selection is for what evolution is but
then if selection precedes all this
then maybe these are just like echoes
of the selection the selecting mechanism
at different scales yeah that's exactly
it so selection is the default in the
universe if you want to
and what happens is that life
the solution that that life has got on
earth life on earth biology on earth
um is unique to earth we can talk about
that um
and that was really hard fought for but
that was that is the solution that works
on earth the ribosome the fundamental
machine that is responsible for every
life for you know every cell on earth of
whatever wherever it is in the in the
kingdom of life
that is an incredibly complex object but
it was evolved over time and it wasn't
involved in a vacuum and i think that
once we understand that selection
can um
occur
um without the ribosome but what the
ribosome does it's a phase transition in
replication
and i think that that and also
technology that that is uh um
probably much easier to get to than we
think
why why do you put
the ribosome as the central
um
part of living organisms on earth it
basically is a combination of two
different polymer systems so rna and
peptides so the rna world if you like
gets transmitted and builds proteins and
the proteins are responsible for all the
catalysis it will the majority of the
catalysis that goes on the cell no
ribosome no proteins no decoding
no evolution so ribosome is looking at
the action so you don't put like the rna
itself as the critical thing like
information you put action as the most
important thing i think the actual
molecules that we have in biology right
now entirely contingent on the history
of life on earth they could there are so
many possible solutions and this is
where chemistry got itself into origin
of life chemistry gets itself into a bit
of a trap yeah let me uh interrupt you
there you've tweeted you're gonna get
i'm i'm gonna cite your tweets like it's
shakespeare okay
it's surprising you haven't gotten
cancelled on twitter yet um it's your
brilliance once again saves you um i'm
just kidding there's there's uh uh you
like to have a little bit of fun on
twitter you've tweeted that quote origin
of life research is a scam
so if this is shakespeare can we analyze
this word why why is the origin of life
research a scam aren't you kind of doing
origin of life research
um
okay it was tongue-in-cheek but yeah i
think and i meant it as tongue-in-cheek
um i am i'm not doing or i'm not doing
the origin of life research i'm trying
to make artificial life
and i also want to to bound the
likelihood of mate of the origin of life
on earth but more importantly to find
origin of life elsewhere but let me
directly address the tweet there are
many many good chemists out there doing
origin of life research but i want to
nudge them and i think they're brilliant
like there's no there's there's no
question
the chemistry they are doing their
motivation is great
so what i meant by that tweet is saying
that maybe they're making assumptions
about saying if only
i could make this particular type of
molecule say this rna molecule or this
phosphodiester or this other molecule
it's going to somehow unlock the origin
of life
and i think that origin of life has been
looking at this for a very long time and
whilst i i think it's brilliant to
work out how you can get to those
molecules i think that chemistry and
chemists doing origin of life could
be nudged into doing something even more
profound and and so the argument i'm
making it's a bit like right now let's
say i don't know the first tesla that
makes its way to
i don't know into a new country in the
world let's say i
let's say there's country x that has
never had a tesla before and they get
the tesla russia
and they take the test and what they do
is they take the tests for a part and
say we want to find the origin of of
cars in the universe and say okay how
did this form and how did this fall
and they just randomly keep making until
they make the door they make the wheel
they make the steering column and all
this stuff and
and they say oh that's the route that's
the way uh that's the way cars emerge on
earth but actually we know that there's
a causal chain of cars going right back
to henry ford and the horse and carriage
and before that maybe you know um
where people were using wheels and and i
think that
obsession with the identities that we
see in biology right now are giving us a
false sense of
security about what we're looking for
and i think the origin of life chemistry
is in danger
of
of not making the progress that it
deserves because the chemists are doing
this is this the field is exploding
right now there's amazing people out
there young and old doing this and
there's deservedly so more money going
in you know i used to complain there's
more money being spent searching for the
higgs boson that we know exists and the
origin of life
you know why is that the origin we
understand the origin of life we're
going to actually work out what life is
and we're going to be outbound the
likelihood of finding life elsewhere in
the universe and most important for us
we are going to know
or have a good idea what the future of
humanity looks like you know we need to
understand that although we're precious
we're not the only life forms in the
universe well that's my very strong
impression i have no data for that it's
just right now a belief and i want to
turn that belief into a more than a
belief by by experimentation
but i coming back to the scam the scam
is if we just make this rna we've we've
got this you know this uh
this fluke event we know how that's
simple
let's make this phosphodiester or let's
make atp or adp we've got that part
nailed let's now make this other
molecule another molecule and how many
molecules are going to be enough and
then
the reason i say this is when you go
back to craig venter
when
he invented
his life forms india
um this micro this this minimal plasmid
it's a it's a myoplasma something i
don't know the name of it but he made
this wonderful um cell and said i've
i've invented life
not quite he facsimiled the genome from
this entity and made it in the lab all
the dna but he didn't make the cell he
had to take an existing cell
that has a causal chain going all the
way back to luca and he showed when he
took out the gene the genes and put in
his genes synthesized the cell could
boot up but it's remarkable that he
could not make a cell from scratch and
even now today synthetic biologists
cannot make a cell from scratch
because there's some contingent
information embodied outside the genome
in the cell
and that is just incredible
so there's lots of layers to the scam
well let me then ask
the question how can we create life in
the lab from scratch
what have been the most promising
attempts at creating life in the lab
from scratch has anyone actually been
able to do it do you think anyone will
be able to do it in the near future if
they haven't already
um can yeah i think that um nobody has
made life in the lab from scratch lots
of people would argue that they have
made progress the craig vent i think the
synthesis of a synthetic genome
milestone in human uh achievement
brilliant yeah can we just walk back and
say
what
uh
would you say from your perspective one
of the world experts in exactly this
area
what does it mean to create life from
scratch where if you sit back whether
you do it or somebody else does it it's
like
damn
this is we just created life
um well what i would i can tell you what
i would expect i would like to be able
to do
is to
go from sand to cells in my lab
and
and can you explain what sand is you
just in organic just in organic stuff
like like like basically just so sand
it's just silica silicon oxide with some
other ions in it maybe some inorganic
carbon some carbonates
just basically clearly dead stuff you
you could just grind rocks into sand and
it would be what in like in a vacuum so
they could remove anything else that
could possibly
uh
be uh
like a shadow of life that can assist in
the chemical you could do that you could
insist and say look i'm going to take
and not just inorganic i want some more
i want to cheat and have some organic
but i want inorganic organic and i'll
explain the play on words in a moment so
i would like to basically put into a
world let's say a completely
you know a synthetic world if you like a
closed world
put some inorganic materials and just
literally add some energy in some form
be it lightning or heat
uv light
and run this thing in cycles
over time and let it solve the search
problem so
i see the origin of life as a search
problem in chemical space
and then i would wait literally wait for
a life form to crawl out the test tube
that's the joke i tell my group
literally wait uh uh for a very and
don't worry it's gonna be very feeble
it's not gonna take over the world you
know there's ways of ethically
containing his last words
it was indeed indeed indeed but i i i
you know this is being recorded right
it'll make you
it will not make you look good once it
crawls out of the lab and destroys all
of human civilization but yes but there
is very good there's a very good things
you can do to prevent that yeah for
instance if you put stuff in your world
which isn't earth abundant so let's say
we make life based on molybdenum and it
escapes it would die immediately because
there's not enough molybdenum in the
environment so we can put in we can we
can do it we can do responsible life or
as i fantasize with my research group on
our away day that would go in it's you
know i think it's actually
morally
we if life if we don't find if you met
until humanity finds life in the
universe this is going on a tangent it's
our moral obligation to make origin of
life bombs identify dead planets and
bomb them with our origin of life
machines and make them alive i think it
is our moral obligation to do that
i'm sure some people might argue with me
about that but i think that we need a
lot more life in the universe and then
we kind of forget we
we did it and then come back
and then say where did you come from but
coming back to the what i'd expect so
let's just say are there
are you back it's i think this is once
again a rick and morty episode
definitely it's definitely all rick and
morty all the way down so we i imagine
we have this pristine
um experiment and everything is you know
sanitized and we put in inorganic
materials and we we have cycles with
them day night cycles up down whatever
and we
look for evidence of replication and
evolution over time and that's what the
experiment should be now are there
people doing this in the world right now
there are a couple of there's some
really good groups doing this there's
some really interesting scientists doing
this around the world
they're kind of
perhaps
too much associated with the scam
so
and
and so they're using molecules
that are already we're already invented
by biology so there's a bit of
replication built in
um but i still think the work that is
doing they're doing is amazing um but i
would like people to be a bit freer and
say let's just basically shake a load of
sand in a box and wait for life to come
out because that's what happened on
earth and so that we have to understand
that now how would i know i've been
successful well because i'm not
obsessing with
what molecules are in life
now i i would wager a vast quantity of
money um i'm not very rich so just be a
few dollars but for me
um
the the the solution space will be
different
so the the genetic material will be not
rna
the proteins will not be what we think
they'll it would the solutions will be
just completely different and it might
be and it'll be very feeble because
that's the other thing we should be able
to show
um fairly robustly that even if i did
make or someone did make a new life form
in the lab it would be so poor
that it's not going to leap out it is
the the fear about making a lethal life
form
in the lab from scratch is um
similar to us imagining that we're going
to make the terminator uh boston
dynamics tomorrow yeah simply not you
and and i and the problem is we don't
communicate that properly i know you
yourself very um you explain this very
well you know there is not the ai
catastrophe coming
um we're very far away from that that
doesn't mean we should ignore it same
with the origin of life catastrophe it's
not coming anytime soon we shouldn't
ignore it but we shouldn't let that fear
stop us from doing those experiments but
this is a much much longer discussion
because there's a lot of details there i
would say there is potential for
catastrophic events
to happen
in much dumber ways within in ai space
there's a lot of ways to create like uh
social networks that are creating a kind
of uh accelerated
set of events that we might not be able
to control the
social network virality in the digital
space
can create
mass movements of ideas that can then if
times are tough
create military conflict and all those
kinds of things but that's not intel
super intelligent ai
that's an interesting
at scale application of ai and if you
look at viruses viruses are pretty dumb
but at scale their application is pretty
detrimental and so origin of life much
like
all the kind of virology you know
um
the very contentious word of gain of
function research and virology sort of
like research on viruses
uh
messing with them
genetically that can create a lot of
problems if not done well so we have to
be very
cautious so there's a kind of whenever
you're ultra cautious about stuff
in ai or in virology and biology
it borders on cynicism i would say where
it's like everything we do is going to
turn out to be destructive and terrible
so i'm just going to sit here and do
nothing
okay that's a possible solution
except for the fact that somebody's
going to do it
it's
science and technology progresses
so we have to do it in an ethical way in
a good way considering in a transparent
way in an open way
considering
all the possible positive trajectories
that could be taken and making sure as
much as possible that we walk those
trajectories so yeah i don't think
terminator is coming but a totally
unexpected version of terminator
maybe around the corner yeah it might be
here already yeah so i agree with that
and so going back to the origin of life
discussion i think that in synthetic
biology right now
we have to be very careful about how we
edit genomes and edit synthetic biology
to do things so that's kind of that's
where things might go wrong in the same
way as you know twitter turning
ourselves into kind of
strange scale effects
i would love
origin of life research or artificial
life research to get to the point where
we have those worries
because that's why i think we're just so
far away from that we are ju you know
right now i think there are two really
important um angles there is the origin
of life people researchers who are
faithfully working on this
and trying to make those molecules the
scan molecules i talk about
and then there are people on the
creationist side who's saying look the
fact you can't make these molecules and
you can't make a cell means that um
evolution isn't true and all this other
stuff gotcha yeah and so and
i find that really frustrating because
actually the origin of life researchers
are all working in good faith right yes
and and so what i'm trying to do is give
origin of life research a little bit
more of a of a of an open
an open context and one of the things i
think is important um i really want to
make a new life form in my lifetime i
really want to prove that life
is a general phenomena a bit like
gravity in the universe because i think
that's going to be really important for
humanity's um
global
psychological state
meaning going forward that's beautifully
that's beautifully put so one it will
help us understand ourselves
so that's useful for science but two it
gives us
a kind of hope if not uh
an awe
at all the huge amounts of alien
civilizations that are out there if you
can build life
and understand just how easy it is to
build life
then that's just as good if not much
better than discovering life on another
planet yeah it's
i mean it's cheaper it's much cheaper
and much easier
and uh
probably much more conclusive because
once you're able to create life
like you said it's a search problem that
uh
there's probably a lot of different ways
to do it so once you create the once you
find the first solution
you probably have all the right
methodology for finding all kinds of
other solutions yeah and wouldn't it be
great if we could find a solution i mean
it's probably a bit late for
i mean i worry about climate change but
i'm not that worried about climate
change and i think what one day you
could think about
could we engineer a new type of life
form that could basically and i i don't
want to do this i don't think we should
do this necessarily but it's a good
thought experiment
that would perhaps take co2 out of the
atmosphere or or an intermediate life
form so it's not quite alive it's almost
like a like an add-on that we can with a
time
a time
dependent add-on you could give to say
cyanobacteria in the ocean or to maybe
to wheat and say right we're just going
to we're going to fix a bit more co2
and we're going to work how much we need
to fix to basically save the climate
and
and we're going to use evolutionary
principles to basically get there
what worries me is that biology has had
a few billion years to find a solution
for co2 fixation it hasn't really
done
it's not the solution isn't brilliant
for our needs but biology wasn't
thinking about our needs biology was
thinking about biology's needs
but i think if we can do as you say make
life in the lab
then suddenly we don't need to go to
everywhere and conclusively prove it i
think we make life in the lab we look at
the extent of life in the solar system
how far did earth life get probably were
all martians probably life got going on
mars the chemistry on mars seeded earth
that might have been a legitimate way to
kind of truncate the surface space
but in the outer solar system we might
have completely different life forms on
enceladus on europa um and and tyson and
that would be a cool thing because okay
wait a minute wait a minute wait a
minute wait a minute
did you just say that you think in terms
of likelihood
life started on mar like uh
statistically speaking life started on
mars and seeded earth it could be
possible because life was like so mars
was habitable uh for the type of life
that we have right now type of chemistry
before earth so it seems to me that like
mars got searching doing chemistry
and started way before yeah and so they
had a few more replicators and some
other stuff and if those replicas got
ejected from mars and landed on earth
and earth would like
i don't need to start again right
thanks for that and then it just carries
on so i i'm not going i think there is
we will find evidence of life on mars
either life we put there by mistake
contamination or actually life the
earliest remnants of life
um and that would be really exciting
it's a really good reason to go there
but i think it's more unlikely because
the gravitational situation in the solar
system if we find life in the outer
solar system titan and all that that
would be its own thing exactly wow that
would be so cool if we go to mars and we
find life that looks a hell of a lot
similar to earth life and then we'll go
to uh
titan and all those weird moons with the
ices and the volcanoes and all that kind
of stuff and then we find there
something that looks
i don't know way weirder yeah some other
some non-rna type of in my situation
almost life like in the prebiotic
chemical space and i think there are
four types of exoplanets we can go look
for right because when jwst goes up and
touch wood it goes up and everything's
fine
when we look at a star we'll know
statistically most stars have planets
around them what type of planet are they
are they going to be dead
are they going to be
just a prebiotic origin of life coming
so are they going to be technological
and you know so with intelligence on
them and will they will they have died
so so you know from you know had life on
them but all the four states therefore
and so and suddenly it's a bit like i
want to classify planets the way we
classify stars yeah and i think that in
terms of their rather than having this
all we've found that we've found methane
there's evidence of life we've found
oxygen that's the evidence of life we
found whatever molecule marker
um and start to then start frame things
a little bit more but as those four
states yeah which by the way you're just
saying four but there could be a um
before the dead there could be other
states that we humans can't even
conceive
just prebiotic almost alive you know got
the possibility to come alive i think um
but there could be a post-technological
like whatever we think of as technology
that could be uh
a like pre-conscious
like well we all meld into one super
intelligent conscious or some weird
thing that naturally happens over time
yeah i mean i i think that um
we join into a virtual metaverse and and
start creating which is kind of an
interesting idea almost arbitrary
uh number of copies of each other much
more quickly so we can mess with
different ideas like i can create a
thousand copies of lex
uh like every possible version of flex
and then just see like and then i just
have them like argue with each other and
like until like in the space of ideas
and see who wins out
how how could that possibly go wrong but
anyway but that there's uh especially in
this digital space where you could start
exploring with ai's mixed in you can
start engineering arbitrary
intelligences you can start playing in
the space of ideas which might move us
into a world that looks very
different than a biological world like
our current world the technology is
still very much tied to our
biology it's
we we might move past that definitely we
definitely will
definitely that could be another phase
then sure because then you but i did say
technological so i think i agree with
you i think so you can have let's let's
get this right so
um dead world no prospective alive
um prebiotic world life emerging living
and technological and you probably and
the dead one you probably won't be able
to tell between the dead never been
alive and the dead one
maybe what some artifacts so maybe
there's five there's probably not more
than five um and i think the
technological one could allow could have
life on it still but it might just have
exceeded because uh you know one way
that life might survive on earth is if
we can work out how to deal with the
coming
the real climate change that comes when
the sun expands
there might be a way to survive that you
know
um
but um yeah i think that we need to
start thinking statistically when it
comes to
looking for life in the universe let me
ask you then
sort of uh
statistically
how many alien civilizations are out
there
in those four phases that you're talking
about when you look up the stars
and you're sipping on some wine
and um
talking to other people with british
accents about something intelligent
intellectual i'm sure uh
do you think there's uh a lot of alien
civilizations looking back at us
i'm wondering the same my
romantic view of the universe is really
i'm taking loans from my logical self so
what i'm saying is i have no doubt i
have no idea
but
having said that
there is no reason to
suppose that life is as hard as we first
thought it was
and so if we just take earth as a marker
and if i think that life is a much more
general phenomena than just our biology
then i think the the universe is full of
life
and the firm the reason for the fermi
paradox is not that um
they're not out there it's just that we
can't interact with the other life forms
because they're so different
and i'm not saying that they're
necessarily like hasn't depicted in a
rival or other you know um
i'm just saying that perhaps
there are very few universal facts in
the universe
and that and maybe um
that is not it's quite the our
technologies are quite divergent and so
i think that it's very hard to know how
we're going to interact with alien life
you think there's a lot of kinds of life
that's possible i guess that was the
intuition yeah
you provided that uh
the way
biology itself but even this particular
kind of biology that we have on earth
uh is
is something that is just one sample of
on nearly infinite number of other
possible
complex
autonomous self-replicating type of
things that could be possible and so
we're almost
unable to see the alternative
versions of us
huh i mean we'll still be able to detect
them we'll still be able to interact
with them we'll still be able to
like which uh what's exactly is lost in
translation why can't we why can't we
see them why can't we talk to them
because i too
have a sense
you put it way more poetically but
it seems both
statistically
and uh
sort of romantically
it feels like the universe should be
teeming with life like super intelligent
life
and and uh i just i i sit there and the
fermi paradox is very
it's felt very distinctly by me when i
look up at the stars because it's like
it it's uh the same way i feel when i'm
driving through new jersey and listening
to bruce springsteen and i feel quite
sad
uh it's like louis c.k talks about
pulling off to the side of the road and
just weeping a little bit i'm almost
like
wondering like hey why why aren't you
talking to us you know it feels lonely
it feels lonely because it feels like
they're out there
i think that there are a number of
answers to that i think the firming
paradox is is perhaps based on the
the assumption that there's
if life did emerge in the universe it
would be similar to our life
and there's only one solution
um and i think that what we've got to
start to do is go out and look for
selection detection
rather than an evolution detection
rather than life detection
and i and i think that once we start to
do that we might start to see really
interesting things
and we haven't been doing this for very
long um
and we are living in an expanding
universe and that makes the problem a
little bit harder
everybody's always leaving
um but i'm i'm distance wise i'm very
optimistic that we will
well i don't know there are two movies
that came out in the same within six
months of one another
at astra
and cosmos at astra they're very
expensive blockbuster you know with brad
pitt in it and um saying there is no
life and it's all you know we've got a
life on earth as more pressures and
cosmos which is a uk production which
basically aliens came and visited earth
one day and they were discovered in the
uk
right it was quite it's a it's a fun
film
um and but i really loved those two
films and i'm i i and at the same time
those films at the time those films are
coming out i was working on a paper
um a life detection paper and i found it
was so hard to publish this paper
and it was almost as depressing i got so
depressed trying to get this science out
there that i felt
the depression
of the the film and al astra like life
is there's no no life elsewhere in the
universe
and but i but i'm incredibly optimistic
that i think we will find life in the
universe firm evidence of life and it
will have to start on earth making life
on earth and surprising as we have to
surprise ourselves and make
non-biological life on earth and then
people say well you you made this life
on earth therefore it's
you're part of the causal chain of that
and that might be true but if i can show
how i i i'm able to do it with
very little cheating or very little
information inputs just creating like a
a model planet some description and
watching it watching life emerge then i
think that we will be even to to
persuade even the hardest critic
that that is it's possible now with
regards to the fermi paradox
i think that we might crush that with
the jwst
it's basically if i recall correctly the
mirror is about 10 times the size of the
hubble
that we're going to be able to do
spectroscopy look at colors of
exoplanets i think
not brilliantly but we'll be able to
start to classify them
and we'll start to get a real
feel for what's going on in the universe
on these exoplanets because it's only in
the last
few decades i think maybe even last
decade that we even
came to recognize that exoplanets even
are common
and i think that that give