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Language: en
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what kind of questions can science not
currently answer but might soon when you
think about the problems and the
mysteries before us that maybe will then
reach a science I think an obvious one
is the origin of life we don't know how
that happened there's a difficulty in
knowing how it happened historically
actually you know literally on earth but
starting life from non-life is something
I kind of think we're close to right we
really think so how like how difficult
is it to start lie - well I I've talked
to people and including on the podcast
about this you know life requires three
things
life as we know it so there's a
difference of life which who knows what
it is and life as we know it which we
can talk about with some intelligence so
life as we know it requires
compartmentalization you need like a
little membrane around your cell
metabolism you need to take in food and
eat it and let that make you do things
and then replication okay so you need to
have some information about who you are
that you passed down through to future
generations in the lab
compartmentalization seems pretty easy
not hard to make lipid bilayers that
come into a little cellular walls pretty
easily metabolism and replication are
hard but replication we're close to
people have made RNA like molecules in
the lab that I think the
state-of-the-art is they're not able to
make one molecule that reproduces itself
but they're able to make two molecules
that reproduce each other yeah so that's
okay that's pretty close
metabolism is harder believe it or not
even though it's sort of the most
obvious thing but you want some sort of
controlled metabolism and the actual
cellular machinery in our bodies is
quite complicated it's hard to see it
just popping into existence all by
itself it probably took a while but it's
we're making progress and in fact I
don't think we're spending nearly enough
money on it if I were the NSF I would
flood this area with money cuz it would
change our view of the world if we could
actually make life in the lab and
understand how it was made originally
here on earth
you