Life in the Universe

00:00:00 I didn't realize any of these that's

00:00:41 quite a trek back and forth between doing and so you live in [Music] [Music]

00:01:13 [Music] [Music] I'm Edna session the director of the

00:01:45 center thank you for being here this afternoon before I present the participants in the roundtable I'd like to say a couple of words about the upcoming programs our next program is going to be in April I think it's April 27th it's on the Anthropocene about climate change after that we have a

00:02:18 roundtable in May on shame and then in June early June I think it's the seventh of June we have a roundtable on status oh and we are now working on the roundtables for the fall we have narrowed down to about five or six objects and I'll they'll be on our website shortly I would present the

00:02:50 participants alphabetically and they can raise their hand so you know who they are and I'm going to be very brief in their BIOS you all have I think the print ads cannot deal is professor of physics and chemistry at Stony Brook University and director of the Laffer Center for physical biology he helped solve the protein folding problem and is interested in the principles of proteins cell evolution and the early molecular

00:03:22 origins of life [Music] pria not Iranian priyamvadha Natori and I should say more formally his professor of astronomy and physics at the Yale University his research is focused on exotica in the universe dark matter dark energy and black holes she is noted for her key contributions

00:03:55 to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology mapping the distribution of dark matter and tracing the growth history of black holes some of you have maybe gotten hold of what we printed out about a prediction she made that has finally been proven correct she made the prediction 20 years ago when she was a graduate student at Cambridge University she predicted that cosmic winds driven by a black hole

00:04:26 could potentially carry gas and other start making materials thousands of years away from their host galaxies and apparently now that has been proven correct there was some controversy around it but now it has been proven correct then it's over by sitting there is the

00:04:58 cosmic affairs correspondent for the New York Times his reporting can range from the mating habits of black holes and zero-gravity fashion shows to science in the movies the status of Pluto and the fate of the universe he's the author of two books lonely hearts of the cosmos the story of the scientific quest for the secret of the universe which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award for nonfiction and Einstein in love a scientific romance Caleb Scharf

00:05:36 research he is a director of astrobiology at Columbia University his research research career spans cosmology expects eggs or planetary science and astrobiology he currently leads efforts at Columbia University in New York to understand the nature of exoplanets and living environments in the universe he is also global science coordinator of the earth life science Institute's origins of origins network at the Tokyo

00:06:07 Institute for technology and the co-founder of white house Inc that's why house ink the roundtable today was initiated by communication at Turner and I had together and he has helped me in the planning of this roundtable his

00:06:38 professor of Astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and an affiliate scientist at University of Tokyo Tokyo flea Institute for the physics and mathematics of the universe he has carried out extensive astronomical observations at numerous US and international observatories working in both theoretical and observational astrophysics he has published more than 250 research papers with concentration or the broad range of

00:07:08 topics so with that we can start what we told she likes going around tables okay so I thought I'd start by talking about so the team of this afternoon is life in the universe and I love to mention two

00:07:40 aspects that particularly fascinated me first is a recent development which is the expansion of the code of life as it were the sort of development of the the synthesis of new eight additional four letters in the genetic code synthetically done just reported very recently just about a month ago and I think Kent can probably elaborate a little bit more on what the implications

00:08:11 are but the implications are just astounding because these additional four constituents you know in our DNA we have G C a and T and these expansion of those four to eight just combinatorially sort of increases the number of ways in which you could possibly create life and broaden the definition of what life really is so I found that very very near

00:08:43 develop and very exciting to read and so I don't actually work on astrobiology myself but you know I regard myself as someone who is takes a lot of intellectual risks and a sort of bold and so I wanted you know I've thought a lot about the ways in which our conceptions of what life is and and therefore its probability of occurring as we know it similar to us I think we've limited our possibilities and I

00:09:16 think we should open our imaginations to really speculate about sort of wild other forms of life and I think you know in the past historically people have been bolder than we have been and I sort of invite us to think more broadly about what could be life now the second point I sort of wanted to make was about a new

00:09:46 way to think about what really life is and thinking about life and intelligent life so this is these are being disciplined debates in the field across disciplines maybe think about life not just as the possibility for self replication and so on but also think about it more broadly so that we can bring in the concept of intelligent life as the ability to produce information and the period for which that

00:10:18 information could last so we could think about how advanced a civilization is for example because these are the these are going to come up when we talk about how we assess whether we can have intelligent life elsewhere and I think there's a way you know if you look at the amount of information that's oops it's just you in the past

00:10:49 [Laughter] so I think if we you know I like to think about if you look at DNA and how much information there is right and and we look at all the information in the books and the knowledge that we've created actually quantify that I think this capacity to generate information that is multifold so in our case it's about you know 500,000 to a million

00:11:19 times more than the material that the information that constitutes us that could be a new way of thinking about intelligence I actually wanted to jump it so you brought it up and I think it's really interesting and I'm curious to get people's reactions this this new piece of work I think it was Steve Benner in his group who constructed essentially DNA with eight letters if

00:11:53 you will base pairs rather than in the alphabet rather than four and you know and I think it's it's clearly a it's a wonderful technical piece of work but I have some questions about I'm wondering if anyone else has some thoughts on this so yeah so it seems to me it's a proof of possibility but it's not a proof of existence and part of the reason I think it's not proof of existence in any by any stretch the imagination is it's one thing to manufacture a set of molecules

00:12:25 that do something seemingly more than the the naturally evolved set of molecules the DNA but that doesn't tell you that an organism could have evolved somewhere that utilizes eight base pairs because of the burden that comes with that I assume I'm looking at you because you may never a response this you to make use of eight letters in your code means you have to have a set of

00:12:58 machinery molecular machinery that isn't overly burdened by the energetic demands of suddenly having to write doom what is that how do you feel about that I agree I think where these new bases are going to be a value as drug discovery because they're going to give us better handles on being able to go after DNA and go after the proteins that they make I don't think it's gonna tell us very much about what life could have done for the following reason that what living systems now uses

00:13:30 20 amino acids and so there's this 64 option code at the moment genetic code and as you say there's cost to on one hand there's combinatorics and that's an advantage because it gives you a new space of what options could I have and yet biology settled on essentially twenty few others but essentially 20 amino acids and as you say there are costs there Fitness cost to everything and one of the things that you see especially in bacteria over time is they really strip down their genomes and they

00:14:02 strip down their machinery to be just as efficient as they possibly can and so if a 40 letter if 40 amino acids were a good idea I think we would see it and we don't and I think the reason for that is because diversity chemical diversity is the thing that's so powerful in proteins that you don't have in nucleic acids chemical diversity right now with the 20 amino acids we have plus charge - charge hydrophobic interactions salt bridges hydrogen bonding we cover the whole

00:14:33 spectrum of the kinds of things you want to do as a chemist it covers all the kinds of little pieces of molecule that you want to what is contingent on the environment and what is available so we're talking about earth-like conditions right so I was just arguing for the possibility of imagination with thee Israel now not necessarily a realistic rubric for how you would make life but isn't everything contingent the ways in which

00:15:05 things that we've all our contingent on the base conditions that were available on earth so you could imagine yes or no I mean there's a lot there's this classic comment that nothing in biology can be understood except in the line of evolution and that's sort of the point of view of I need to know the history of something in order to know how it works on the other hand it's much more like a sort of thermodynamics problem once you know the environment you can specify what the thing is what the biological

00:15:37 thing is think about an eyeball I don't need to know where it came from but it's really really optimized to do the job that it does it sees very well you can see over nine orders of magnitude of light intensity between night and day and so forth really really optimized and they don't have to know a lot about the history to know about this one point coming back to your point though also about polymers is that not only the DNA but also in proteins now there's new diversity and a colleague at in

00:16:07 California has developed these molecules called peptides it's a different kind of molecule than a peptide a different kind of molecule than a protein and so it has different kinds of monomer units but they're kind of similar in certain ways and it turns out they do a lot of the same kinds of things that real proteins do so in principle life could have gone that way too it could have gone a lot of ways and why it ended up where it did I don't know if I can say I think the your first point about the new letters in the

00:16:40 comm sort of highlights one of the trade-offs are forms of a dilemma that that our basic genetic code already presents us with you know one of the most amazing things about biology is the incredible diversity of life forms we have on our earth you know I always say from Giants the koi is - you know it you know six single-celled organisms of a huge variety of sorts complicated organism mammals and things

00:17:11 like us you know you name it it's hard to even think about the huge diversity of things yet they all have this same genetic code in operation well why is that possible it's like it's the same reason you can write a huge variety of books or novels using the letters of the alphabet you've bought into this combinatoric world where a finite number of things let you do it a huge variety of things so you can write a novel that makes you a giant sequoia tree or you can write a novel that you know makes you a fungus and you

00:17:44 can do it all with the same health of this and you're adding a few letters to the alphabet as it were but the other side of that you know and when we first discovered and when it was first discovered that you know these monomers that make up the polymers the letters of the alphabet can be synthesized in natural environments fairly readily and probably occur we know it in fact occur in many places in nature made everyone feel very optimistic about the topic

00:18:15 today life in the universe that we might go through it easily imagine they have the same alphabet in many places of the universe but then the other horn of that dilemma is it becomes like monkeys typing Shakespearean sonnets you have you know there's so many ways of putting these letters together the chance that blind processes before you get evolution started which is the Lexx birthday certain things that wine prophecy processes will write you us experience

00:18:46 sonnet or a novel or something starts getting smaller and smaller and personally if you know it was somehow revealed to us that there was no non terrestrial life anywhere in the observable universe if it was just dead dead dead out there everywhere and then I had to make a guess at why my guess would be that this is the only place where the monkeys managed to put together a sonnet and everywhere else they wrote nonsense and and life never got started I'm not saying that the case

00:19:18 I'm just saying that would be my best guess is it possible adding some letters to the alphabet doesn't help that problem in fact it makes it worse that's extra keys the monkeys get hit on the keyboard and you know change a word interested nonsense and what is Shakespeare is defined by us and our culture you could have a culture that defines what we call nonsense is valuable well it could be the third in fact I think it's more likely in fact that if there's something else out there it's quite different from us exactly but

00:19:50 it still has to be something that works you know so that we produces itself or that at least persists even if it doesn't reproduce so I think that's these new codes sort of add to that that trade-off that we face I like the idea of nonsense being valued I mean but then it calls see how do you define is it just randomness it's seen as this is drifting into the question about intelligence and other things but I

00:20:23 really value what how do you how do you how do we generate systems as a peoples of what is considered valuable and so it goes into other I sort of close out with the eyeballs I mean do you think that do you not reckon that our eyeballs like a set of eyeballs let's forget about ours could have evolved very differently in a middling rich atmosphere and if our atmosphere did not have the diffractive

00:20:54 properties that it did that provided the basis for our eyeballs to have the range they optimized for that right so could you could you contemplate that you could have eyeballs that are optimized for methane-rich absolutely what I say is the argument I meant to make before is that I don't need to know but I certainly need to know the environment because that's really what Darwin's all about it's about matching to an environment and so if your environment was totally different let's

00:21:25 say it was black and dark like at the bottom of the ocean then I've also wouldn't make any sense at all I would spend a lot of energy on stuff that wouldn't be relevant but if you the history so this issue of eyeballs versus not eyeballs has also come up a lot in sort of evolution and intelligent design debates of it's a complex system and how could you get a complex system unless there were some and and in the making of it all and so forth but if you look at the history of especially sort of early organisms like snails and mollusks and

00:21:58 so on what you see is a pretty nice story whether it's true or not we never know but it's a nice story and that is that in the earliest mollusks what you see is a flat row of cells where some of them are a little bit more light-sensitive and that gives you some value then if you go further down the evolutionary tree what you see is it's curved a little bit that row of cells is now not flat anymore it's curved in that way it turns out you can collect light then you get a pinhole you keep going further down the tree you get a pinhole

00:22:29 then you get a lens then you get a complicated eye so you can sort of see what's going on here it's it's detecting light and it's trying to get finer and finer resolution in that way but I totally agree with you if you you I I think I'll just often speak of genotype to phenotype which means our DNA tells everything but it's missing one major thing and that is what's the environment that we're optimized for just to not not to I mean because it's such a specific example but I think this is true that

00:23:00 the the camera eye that we share with cephalopods so I mean actually evolved in marine environment right so it's kind of like your methane environment it already evolved in a different environment and now actually with with the adaptation of that because we're walking around on the surface right and what a point coming back to your point about the continent works.we there's a lot of interest inventory

00:23:30 apartments some having to do with my direct area which is protein effective they also have many degrees of freedom how does a protein find the rate structure in a reasonable time it does so all persons pull up in microseconds in your body and so put another protein as knows how to do all this stuff but but the question you raised is a sequence basis very interesting one I think because the arguments are if I have twenty different amino acids that are making up each bead on a necklace of

00:24:03 a protein molecule what is the likelihood that I would be able to get exactly the right sterling beads of coding for one favorite proteins let's say lysozyme typical protein is one hundred or a thousand amino acids long and if I have 20 possible options in each position I have 20 to the 100 is the size of the space would have to explore in order to find that one protein and so the issue is G that's essentially embossed

00:24:33 probabilities 0 1 over 20 to 100 this ten to the minus hundred and thirtieth that would never happen and over the years what we've found though is that what matters is mechanism and so it's very much in monkey on a typewriter analogous it's very much the monkeys hitting each key in same but if the monkey was hitting Keys in somewhere this way you could do very much better very quickly and in the protein case looking at protein sequences how I get license ID a

00:25:05 critical question between those who thing's probability is zero and people who say no it could happen the critical issue is how do we ask the probability question what is the probability of getting the sequence of lysozyme that's one question or what is the probability of getting any sequence that folds to the structure of lysozyme they seem very similar but there are a hundred orders of magnitude different in the answer that you get and so mechanism wise what's been found is that yes we

00:25:38 have a 20 letter code today we have 20 amino acids that you go here or here or here but what's relevant for figuring out how the protein folds and then how it functions it's just a binary code it's some of you know as half the amino acids are oily and they don't like water and so they clump together and the other half are not so oily so you have blue and red beads instead of twenty different types of feed so if I have 2 to the 130 to the 100 already I've just

00:26:09 disappeared a hundred magnitude of the problem right there and there's now some experiments that indicate that something like that is roughly or thank you I mean it seems to me again on our question of life or the universe that there's that there's sort of two basic possibilities and places in between them that at the extremes it's that the monkeys are it's completely random and at the other extreme there's some deterministic sequence of chemical reactions right you know that puts

00:26:39 together just the molecules that that we need to get life started which is sort of sounds scary in a way because it means life scary and a sort of scientists point of view admit it so somehow would imply that the existence of life was built into the basic laws of chemistry and physics if that were the case though then we would know very likely I think have tons of life out there and the universe it would because it looks like the we have tons of environments having 2025 years ago we

00:27:13 would couldn't've when we didn't know anything much about exoplanets they could have done there was no life because there was no one suitable environment but we're pretty sure there plenty of suitable environments so if it's a deterministic process you know we're off to a Star Wars universe so to speak or every planet has something interesting and going on from a biology point of view many planets of course it could also be somewhere in between where there's many you know it's just like the monkeys don't have to type exactly that sonnet they're many solvents that could

00:27:44 have been written and maybe there's enough of them that it's fairly common but you know between those two extremes you get an empty universe or a full universe and I think based on what we know now I'm no biologist I'm sure you know better but it's it is conceivable that it's sort of anywhere in between life could be quite common you know slightly common quite rare very it's it's very important in science to keep track of what you don't know and I think despite the fact that I think popular

00:28:17 belief is that there's probably quite a bit of in the universe and there certainly a long popular interest in that Dennis may be able to sit me about that and roughs of us but you know it's we really don't know the answer you could say at this point right there's a lot of room between the impossible and inevitable thank you for sending that signal and I think in in chemistry and biology for example a lot of the issue is how long does it take so things that can be

00:28:48 pretty close to the impossible and can still happen if you have enough little agents and this is one of the great things about biology is you have cells everywhere in bacteria everywhere organisms everywhere and so in Darwinian processes it also matters just how many attempts you're making and if you've just got a huge population and you've got a long enough time you can sooner or later get there and I mean life I mean it's I don't think it was closer to inevitable because we certainly took a

00:29:18 long time to develop it here on earth as far as anybody can tell I guess you owe me no better than I do but it seems like it was about four billion years old we have life by 3.5 billion single cells and then another billion later we had multi cells and so on he takes that 1/2 billion years is not quick I think so it

00:29:49 just happens like instantly I think especially since there's a selection effect we had to be on one of the planets where it happened otherwise we wouldn't be here right like I think we've said let's make happen go and yours business sound like such a short length of time think about cosmology exactly so well question I have what would it take anybody here to convince

00:30:20 anybody here the therm they had found life someplace else I mean huh how hostage are we to the our good yeah do we have you know how would you know what what signal from another exoplanet would actually convince you there was a life there so I mean this is something that a lot of discussion has taken place up in recent years and it's interesting just you know looking at how different scientific disciplines approach this so for example astronomers

00:30:51 who were looking at exoplanets and hoping in the near future to be able to get slightly more sophisticated data about planets that may or may not resemble the earth tend to talk about bio signatures very often just yeah so biasing is just covers a number of things so one potential buyers signature is what life might do to the chemistry of a planet in particular the atmosphere and also the idea is with future telescopes we may be able to probe using

00:31:24 light filtered through the atmospheres of those planets we may be able to see whether there are things like oxygen or water co2 conceivably even methane and so on all of which we we think may have an association with biospheres based largely on what's happening here on earth so that's a very simplistic approach though and already even before we've done it we're running into problems with it so for example in the last couple of years our planetary scientists and

00:31:55 astronomers who are interested in this question have begun to recognize that you could actually have in a number of circumstances a rocky planet that has an oxygenated atmosphere but no life the oxygen comes from combination of chemistry that happens in in the atmosphere itself the breakdown of molecules like water or co2 by by ultraviolet photons and depending on the kind of surface chemistry you have that may or may not get mopped up by the surface of the planet so you can actually produce a planet with an

00:32:25 oxygen-rich atmosphere with no bias fear whatsoever so then of course you say well you've got to look for the other signature Maalik to build up a story and so that's a you know I think that's a very good be sound terrible Simon astronomer it's a naive way of doing things I think part of what you're asking is a much deeper question which is perhaps more relevant to looking for life on Mars for example and that's been a topic of discussion you know the ideal thing would be something

00:32:56 to crawl past your microscope wave at you and look familiar who was dragging a typewriter and then yeah so there's all this discussion it comes back to actually something you raise it the a which is you know what is life and maybe you disagree with this but my impression after talking to lots of people over the last few years about this is within science there's a hundred

00:33:28 different definitions that people point to is there sort of favorite way of encapsulating the idea of this thing we call living system some people point to reproduction or you know imperfect reproduction right in order to have Darwinian selection or metabolism or entropy as some gauge of what's going on and it's I mean actually I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on why why it's difficult to come up with that answer you know because it speaks

00:34:00 directly to recognizing life we think that we're alive I mean I think I know that I could well people sometimes say you know the huge fundamental human question that astrobiology addresses is are we alone but I think the number two question almost is important is how different or alike if we're not alone yeah how you know are we unusual or not

00:34:32 it's it's and I think that question the first place is even easier because we could search but until we find something the second question is really impossible it's as though you wanted to study I don't know dogs and you don't thing ever seen one dog and so then you don't know what properties this dog has are specific for that individual dog or to that breed of dogs or to dogs in general and you know

00:35:03 you're just lost it's hard to extract dogmas especially especially without a fundamental first principles understanding about like biology's like that's a dog and modern biology it's like that's a dog's genome genome but we're not you know at the level of being able to answer questions of like defining life at a fundamental level it's a little like as my colleagues Chris chog button Carol Cleland pointed out before the atomic theory of matter

00:35:37 natural philosophers as they were called in those days are alchemists argue about what water is what makes something water is it that you can drink it is it the dissolve things is that it can freeze and boil and to steam and there were even Leonardo argued about what makes something water or not water and there were arguments that thing you've got to make sulfuric acid some plus that was a pure form of water than sea water because it dissolves things much better than seawater sea waters almost

00:36:08 saturated already with dissolved minerals so it's hard to dissolve things in it you know when the atomic theory of matter came along we have h2o of the art the discussion was over and you want water was so if we could ever have a discussion of I mean an understanding of life if that the first principles level then we would be in a lot better position to talk about how to look for it - what would demonstrate it's there but I very much agree with Kailen discussions of detecting life on the

00:36:40 exoplanet these days are well whistling in the dark hopeful let's say but you know it's it looks like it'll be really hard I think it's very would be very difficult to do it with spectroscopy I think chemical definitions and even basic biochemical definitions are very tricky one of the classic sort of disapproves of simple arguments about what his life is metabolizes uses oxygen reproduces and the terms of a candle flame does that and then intelligence

00:37:14 what's real and what's alive and what's not alive I think and only if you think about it people there's something and the cells for that matter there's something about purposeful behaviors but I don't know any spectroscopic way you're ever gonna see something like that what people have talked about looking for pollution industrial pollution quite quite seriously compounds that we cannot think of any non-biologically yeah non biological way to produce them however unfortunately

00:37:46 even there it turns out nature is really good at making things that are unexpected so I recently discussion so chlorofluorocarbons have been held up as one example of a they technologically produced compound that has a definite impact on a planetary pirate by removing ozone in the atmosphere but I recently heard work done people actually studying Earth's deep past there's this giant volcanic lava system called the Deccan Traps and realizing that there's a geophysical

00:38:18 geochemical route by which earth could have produced chlorofluorocarbons all by itself you know 200 million years ago with that well without yeah without the intervention of intelligent life so maybe pollutants aren't even a particularly good signature of any kind of life planets are quite good at polluting themselves so I feel that we're not ever gonna converge on one I think it's not gonna be as simple as h2o I think it's well probably there'll probably be many different definitions

00:38:48 of life maybe what we'll be looking for is some kind of Venn diagram to kind of make the decision of okay is this actually life but you know as I started out in the beginning right I liked your sort of your thread of trying to define intelligent life in terms of information production and the persistence oh yeah and also I mean it does relate to this

00:39:19 question of looking for life in the universe I mean rather ironically right if you found a planet that was beaming out radio structured radio signatures on a TV show you definitely know there's life there right we wouldn't show so I mean then for that reason just to mention you know within my field there has been a growing interest in a resuscitation of this field of SETI of search for extraterrestrial intelligence although

00:39:49 now we call it technique matures because that's a less of a trigger word for the you know people's memories of what we're thought to be failures in the past but actually the part of the issue with the search for extraterrestrial intelligences we've looked so little we really have looked so little but you know that's the remarkable thing is if you got that you were definitely unambiguously I think be able to say that there is recognizable wife on a plane and that feeds into this question of yes you know the nature of intelligent life and the the information

00:40:21 that we carry around externally to it's only humans pretty peculiar in that respect you know we carry around and propagate into the future throughout human history back to the first you know the first exchange of a story around a campfire key night cave art dolphins we call it you know means the the generation of memes and those their propagation but I think it's even more diverse than that that is an interesting quality that we

00:40:52 have and of course it also but it and it's confirmed great evolutionary advantages to us you can write write a book about you know don't eat this plant because it will kill you and a hundred years later someone will read that book and it will save their life right so there's a certain advantage to be able to store this information but it comes at a cost there's an energetic burden to it no and I so what is the current status of the city like funding and programs I mean I

00:41:25 know that in the 1980s it was federally funded they've died in the 1990s what is the status what do you want to say something yeah I don't think there's ever since I think 1992 when they pulled the plug on setting that there's been any federal funding for actual radio sir but there was private funding I think there's private funding there's this this SETI Institute which was give all the SETI scientists said oh okay we're gonna raise our own money and they were

00:41:56 quite successful and they you know Paul Allen built this big array of radio tells for them in Northern California and now they have yuri milner who is like spending Julianne's of dollars leasing telescopes and you know wants to send an iPhone to Alpha Centauri which is an amazing idea it is involved in the great mortars and thanks to initiatives such as the iPhone to the Stars project I should say the breakthrough foundation

00:42:28 which is your real owners foundation funding of SETI is a separate initiative although connection some people involved um and is spending a hundred million dollars over ten years which I think it's the I think the current rate of spending on on setting and it's basically a classical radio SETI looking for signals from you know radio signals enough my cubicle extraterrestrial civilizations is probably the highest rate of spending on SETI that we have

00:42:59 ever had in history and isn't the design of that experiment is to Caleb mentioned that we hadn't looked very much the goal of that it's called breakthrough listen everything that's called breakthrough something in that world so breakthrough was his goal is to expand the volume of phase space frequencies and sensitivities and so on by about a factor of a thousand over what's been done before so however little we have looked so far the goal was to look a

00:43:29 thousand times more by the time this is done it started a few years ago so you know I don't remember exactly when but we probably have another six or seven years before the project not everybody that's still a tiny fraction of the galaxy even when they've well you can look them that that was an amplification yeah that's certainly true it is very hard to prove something isn't there and almost no matter how much you looked you could you know always look much more

00:44:01 because you can look for arbitrarily small signals you can look at different wavelengths like I don't think I'll be talking too much out of school to say that Yuri asked me for advice on how to what to spend money on in a SETI search and I should have mentioned that he took none of my advice which is that's not but there's a lot of possible ways of looking that are not just searching for radio signals it's still very anthropocentric right I wouldn't come back to that so and I remember amazing

00:44:34 to kill him when we met last time that there's a book written in 1864 by coming Flammarion it's called lumen and it's imaginative it's about a planet where you have safety into plants that digest and eat and breathe and speak to each other in a tongue that we wouldn't understand so I mean you know all these ideas of looking for it you know looking for radio signals very tight very answerable morphic view of life so how do we expand

00:45:06 well I think ya know so you're absolutely right and it's also extremely skewed in terms of you think about the history of life on Earth for most of the history of life on Earth no tech no signatures whatsoever would all be chemistry or colors or you know other variations on the planet so in that sense it's it's already almost stacking the odds against if if our planet is so in some way representative of how evolution plays out we obviously

00:45:38 don't know that right the fact that technological beings have only existed for maybe the last 100,000 years we have really no idea whether that's the norm or whether that's some extreme so but yeah so I think you're absolutely right and this is one of the in that whole field it's very very challenging as well people always I think fall into the trap of the well a species would do this wouldn't it completely and it's usually

00:46:16 skewed to you know Western Europe in ways of thinking about the world anyways and that is that is problematic and I'm not sure it's severely limiting limiting yeah but the problem was not doing that you know it's like the old thing is looking for your keys under the light post if you don't look for something that's like this we don't know if you know Yogi Berra said if you don't know where you're going you may not get there if you don't know what you're looking I may not find it and I think

00:46:47 we've seen a recent example of that in discussions of the interstellar small body that passed through the solar system that could like 2017 omoi is the name he was given it has a number of puzzling properties and and the ideas been put Fareed that it was some piece of of alien artifacts you know some sort of spacecraft or space debris zuv some interstellar traveling culture and I

00:47:21 mean it could be but the problem with the hypothesis like that the problem I'm just looking for a sensation it's not like us is that it has too much explanatory and not to the excessive explanatory an insufficient predictive power you can explain anything and predict nothing what can we know nothing about their capabilities or motives and you know no matter what happens you could always say well that's because the aliens wanted to do this or wanted foolís or do something and you know could be but but it's very

00:47:53 hard to engage that hypothesis in a spin assign tag white doesn't mean it isn't true but it's just hard to do anything with it and I mean I think the one positive thing about for example that booboo remover work and particularly some some of these interpretations or or analyses that suggest oh maybe it was a you know a solar sail or light sail or something like that the one positive element of all of that discussion I think is that you know in Bayesian terms

00:48:23 by instead of setting the prior to zero possibility that something unusual might have a relationship to intelligence Weathersby to give it a little leeway yeah it's not it's not zero it's not one it's some tiny tiny number and that to me is very interesting because we haven't really done that before right we've tended to say well that's such we just don't think that's going to be a good possibility which of course means again if you never look if

00:48:53 you have allow it to be one of the possibilities you'll never see it if it actually shows up that's the one positive I think came out of that I'm very sympathetic for all the speculation and you know playing with one's imagination and expanding the possibilities right so I was the one other thing that's always kind of puzzled me is the you know Steven Seagal this famously said that you know if we rewind the tape of evolution on earth

00:49:24 you might not end up with us right so this the role of randomness in evolution is there anything more we can milk the same well this random set of circumstances is there are there people doing experiments like if one something along the sequence that we now understand quite well was different what could we end up with are there simulations curious of them so so I

00:49:58 think one thing that is becoming clear now especially in cell experiments when you where you can replay the tape you can keep running it take the same set of cells you can do all this in the laboratory it's not like watching zebras over you know thousands of years and so on and that's a very big focus these days of evolutionary studies as long as you can work so quickly and see so much and the answer there seems to be replaying the table gives you whatever answer you should get base

00:50:29 you end up in so as opposed to saying I can tell you exactly the route this took usually you can't do that but you can say if you're ending up in an environment that has the following then it's going to succeed in the same way as it does now more or less with some variation and so largely it seems to be if you replay the tape that tilted it to the same endpoint then you're going to get the same result but it's like it's

00:51:00 like no way so coming back to my anything atmosphere yeah so if you run your simulation and say well you're stuck in a habitat that is going to be methane rich then what happens we can play that game now right with ourselves yeah here's here's what I want to do if I live in methane yeah but if you if you said so here's the sort of room issue suppose I said I'm going to live in methane for a little while and then I'm gonna live in an oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere like we do and then you said

00:51:32 okay I'm gonna play the tape differently though I'm gonna swap it and I'm gonna do just the opposite first I'm gonna live in this one then this one but then I'm going to come back to this one so that my endpoint is exactly the same but now I went through a totally different group then the answer at the moment seems to be it only matters what the endpoint is not how you got there and often evolution does seem to take all the rooms it can one thing that the model is you mentioned modeling one of the things that modelers have often found is if you work in very high

00:52:04 dimensional spaces and these are all high dimensional spaces because there's spaces of I could make this mutation at this time then this mutation at that time I have a whole lot of different mutations a lot of different times they could take all kinds of different routes it's like traveling from San Francisco to New York I got all kinds of ways I go through Dallas where I go through Chicago I go this way or I go whatever I got all these different routes and the thing is I can't tell I can't tell anything when I see the car in New York City I don't have any idea where it came

00:52:35 from so I think but I think that the the rule of thumb seems to be in a high and high these high dimensional spaces it turns out pretty much always easy to get from some point to some other point but you can't tell what that route was presumably as well for thinking in practical tangible terms when we say oh the environment is you know its methane environment or toxin richer there are

00:53:05 many other aspects to any given natural environment as that may have a subtle or not subtle influence on what's been going on right and so in reality so in a laboratory condition maybe you do have that case of you will always end up kind of looking the same but in a in a more realistic environment there will be differences at some level but cause of the complexity of the environment itself I would imagine absolutely this is really interesting because this has been

00:53:36 a huge puzzle the grand puzzles really of Darwinian evolution is the the idea of normal evolution is winner-takes-all if I have an environment and this beast can take better advantage of living in that environment than this one can this beast wins and that beast loses and you never see this beast again and you only see this beast winner-take-all but if that's true how do you display all the diversity of life that we see dying this is very difficult to explain and so

00:54:09 it this comes down I think the answer sort of is shaping up to be something along the lines of exactly what you just said and that is sure I have if I'm cell I care about sugar I want my glucose or something I need my food but I also care about other stuff in the environment and all of those things can be coming in it all kinds of different levels and so ninjas are sort of everywhere we can and you could think about this in a sort of a corporate world too you know it's amazing how many different kinds of

00:54:39 Kleenexes there are toothpastes or something like that you know somehow there's a niche for everybody they seem to be able to survive I mean I've thought about that it always seemed to me that this idea of survival of the fittest isn't quite right it's more like even the volume all of the fit enough it's good for all of us it's evolution is sort of a tautology it says what persists persists so any species or

00:55:12 creature well not a single creature but it need any sequence of of ancestry that does well enough not to be extinguished is still here I mean it's again sort of circular tautological and certainly Nietzsche's helped with that but even in the absence of leaf has even in exactly the same environment you can have quite a bit of diversity of things flourishing in a great to the rain forest and there's not one kind of tree or one kind of you know there's you

00:55:43 know I mean sitting there is it but let me inject slightly to your point about survival of the survivors this has certainly been an objection to evolution of well how would I define fitness in the first place if it's anything different than just surviving you know what is there any anything there besides just being a tautology you know you survive if you survive but the classic case that argues that there really is something more to it than that was in early 1800s England this is the

00:56:14 there's a was a moth called the peppered moth and in the old days in England the trees were fairly wide with speckles and the moss and they were fairly white with speckles and so the birds didn't see them they'd land on the trees the birds didn't see them but then from the early 1800s so the Middle Ages the Industrial Revolution happened in England and there was so everywhere and the trees turned black from so and what happened was the moths that evolved were black so the peppered moths were still around the

00:56:45 black moths were there but the peppered moths were the ones that all got picked off by the birds then so they'll argument about survival that fit is what it comes down to in a case like this is survival I think the wording is not great because it really does sort of point you in that direction point all of us in that direction but survival is a property of the whole population and I I want my lineage to survive but Fitness is a property of the individual and so here's a case where the population ultimately survives you

00:57:19 know various moths are going to get picked off and not picked off black ones and peppered ones and so on by the birds but on average that the individuals that survive more are going to be the black ones and so you can say well blackness is what Fitness is all about in this case I have a mechanism that's the individual thing and then the individual thing propagates to the population so I think probably if Darwin recognized that this was going to be a problem he could have or somebody could have figured out a different way of saying it that doesn't make it sound too tautological

00:57:50 otherwise it's too convergent yeah yeah yeah absolutely I'm not contingent in oh yeah yeah and it doesn't give you a sense of sort of what models you know what's the mechanism under underlying any of these things so that's I mean coming back to I guess we're supposed to be talk about life in the universe that suggests then right but one thing we could say about life elsewhere is there will not be a planet of where the only life is a single type of organism with identical structure because that is not how any of

00:58:23 this works yeah that's gonna be a universal yes true yes should be diversity anywhere yes we comforting exactly what kind of diversity yes and it makes us worry a lot as we lose diversity these days another related to that is the point about diversity and early origins and there's a sense that in the old days there was sort of the sense that well somehow or another some cells rose and they got competitive with some other cells and and the cell

00:58:53 lineages were already were competing with each other because that's sort of the fundamental feature of biology is this Darwinian thing about competing and so forth but there's this view now this this guy Nigel golden tell the Illinois and this view very interesting and I think it's very sensible and that is that the way life emerged was not you know your family competing against my family and so on among the animals and species and so on it was this big soup of proteins and nucleic

00:59:28 acids and it was sort of like one organism and the separation out into individual lineages didn't happen till much later and it's interesting because you see this reflected in bacteria there's a thing called horizontal gene transfer and bacteria so so Darwin's tree of evolution says you know I came from my parents and my parents came from their parents and all this stuff and so it's like a tree all the way down but the thing that bacteria do is they violate this tree in a big time way because they just cross over here they

01:00:00 just pass their genes over to anybody who wants them and they and the genes get passed around that's called horizontal gene that stuff happens all the time it's happens in us too we got cells most of 10 10 times more cells or bacteria in us than our cells and yeah and those cells are doing this kind of swapping all the time it was modern technology pushing medicine towards that direction very much yeah yeah yeah

01:00:30 direct transfer again yeah it's that's it's hard where that there's a lot of activity going on right now in kind of the money of the microbiology world to try to figure out the microbiome and how much does your gut have to do with your health and gee could I really could I've reconfigure your gut if you're not healthy and things of that type the difficulty with it is it's harder way harder than studying a single kind of cell because you're studying an entire ecosystem and everybody in there is sort of they've got their neighborhoods and

01:01:02 their communities and it's like New York City but it's in your gut you know it's complicated there's also been a lot of debate about the microbiome and humans or any organisms that hasn't microbiome and you know Darwinian selection in terms of this idea of the homo by art so you know that microbes in you what their interests are what they want or need may be different at some level than what you need and so when you look at a human being questioned I mean I think some

01:01:35 wonder microbiome is not you I mean I was thinking from a sort of Darwinian fitness point of view right are you when you look at a human when I look at Dennis do I evaluate your evolutionary fitness in terms of your cells then what you do is don't what you all that great micro biome or the the combination of that and I know some people have been saying that the selectable quantity is actually the the interaction of all

01:02:06 these things in some sort of abstract sense which is very very fascinating to me because that's sort of moving away to a different sort of definition of complex life that's yeah that's not select ability is can be really complicated and one of the things that's great interest right now is that we make these things if they're mathematical things in they're called Fitness landscapes and they look like hills and

01:02:37 what they're supposed to represent is that organisms that are more fit are higher up the hill and organisms that are less fit or lower down that you know and so these are these are just sort of simple mathematical cartoony kind of representations of that idea so the idea is okay let's be let's see if I we can figure out what kind of organism is more fit than what other organism here's the problem with that and this is what's kind of new and really interesting that's not the whole story it's there's another thing that people are calling the Red Queen hypothesis what that

01:03:09 amounts to is you have also you have predator-prey relations it doesn't it's not just about me fitting my environment just an individual and that individuals personal fitness or the or the lineage for that environment it's the exactly it's it's the environment interacting with everybody and so the predator-prey thing is let's say I'm the prey and you're the predator and we're City we're both sitting at some level on this Fitness landscape you're equally fit and I'm equally fit

01:03:39 or whatever and now you start chasing me but you're chasing me around certain changes that can be made biochemically in me that have nothing to do with me changing my fitness improving it or making it worse or you either it's just you're chasing me and so you get better at capturing me and then my genome loss and I get better at avoiding you and then you get better at catching me again and I get better at avoiding you and it turns out we're running around this hillside never making it any further up but we have to do this because this is

01:04:11 part of evolution too and it makes everything even more complicated than it was we've talked a lot about evolution and I want to suggest some of it we invited us to be imaginative so let's try to imagine a life form our life on the planet where evolution isn't really a major factor it doesn't work very well and let me motivate this by saying I think people are kind of a little hand wavy and vague about what evolution

01:04:43 requires because they are well we just have to have self-replication going and then we'll get selection and we'll have evolution but really there's a lot of factors you have to have a flexible way of storing information it has to express that information has to be expressed some way otherwise there's no selection on it it has to make accurate copies but not too accurate otherwise there won't be any mutations or changes but it has to be accurate enough that you're not forgetting information faster than your

01:05:15 faster than you're generating it and the errors that you may have to be non-deterministic otherwise you'll always go in the same direction so they after in some sense be stochastic a random so you can explore in this whole landscape of of different fitnesses and there was one other oh yeah you have to have them since it all the sticks energy you have to have a stable metabolism to drive it so all of this fooling around with the information content has to go

01:05:46 on without destroying your ability to to make copies neither whose metabolism or destroying the copying mechanism so there's a there's quite a set of fairly complicated requirements for evolution to occur the way it does on earth and obviously it does you know we do have those mechanisms here in its blade as our discussion has Illustrated a dominant role in determining what life is like on the earth but there might be systems of you know made even out of the

01:06:19 same deeds on the you know the same basic biochemistry which don't satisfy all of those things and so you can have life and some of the things some of those factors but it just doesn't evolve very well what I can think of that might lead to just a country so those kinds of simulations yeah that state so there you might find a planet which only has one type of life or something yeah well what it what it made me think off and it's sort of jumping forward a bit it's almost it's a very science fictiony idea it's an outrageous idea so it's it's not

01:06:52 a reasonably it's still in principle something that would happen sort of naturally imagine a species a sophisticated species technological species decides it does not want to evolve anymore right just say no because I mean this is always comes up when we talk about interstellar travel or moving around the galaxy the truth is by the time you end up on the other side of the galaxy you're going to be a different biological entity because of evolution but suppose some species decides it doesn't want to do that so

01:07:24 what it does it says okay there's no more biological reproduction we're going to build a machine and it's just going to pop out clothes on demand and you'll have a lifetime and you'll die and then you'll be berry but when you're not reproducing biologically and now so the question is assuming the environment is stable I mean that could conceivably exist right and it's it's a rational decision right I kind of like a stool stay the same way right I don't want to end up with tentacles or whatever a billion years

01:07:54 time so that I know that sounds like it's an artificial thing but it's not right it's it's a evolution to the point where you make that decision and I'm going to be wiring I'm sorry it sounds kind of boring with reproduction I'm sorry you could still require an arrogance with narcissism of species I

01:08:24 would find you so there are examples of exactly what you're talking about Andrew Murray at Harvard has done a really interesting experiment and it turns out if his cells live in a very fixed environment and they never change they start jettison all kinds of stuff that has to do with evolution so there's this notion of the evolution of evolved ability and so the sense is that certain organisms if you're in a very fluctuating environment you have a lot

01:08:56 of machinery to be able to sort of handle all of those fluctuations but if you're an environment that's very fixed then you can throw a lot of that stuff away and you don't need to evolve but then of course the problem is you're really brittle if all of a sudden some day global warming or something comes along and just changes slightly what your environment looks like bang you're you're kind of every your whole population is dead want us to think a little bit about it it's quite possible

01:09:26 that a species might actually not have the curiosity to go seek out other species right that's another part of the answer imperfect I sort of view that we carry around therefore these are a little more content species that has somehow learned to live better with his environment than we have well there are humans that people that help kids and who said don't go looking for aliens they're gonna come and eat us sometime slave up that's a view that it

01:09:58 might that that people now hold or they are you know that's one view but there are also people who think we shouldn't be spending all this money on the space travel or space right our colonizing Mars or whatever else and that maybe we should save our planet we should eradicate diseases here and learn to live better or even hardly spending any money on those things it's a it doesn't even doesn't make a mark in

01:10:29 the federal budget really we're not spending money on either of those it feels like it's people people object to the attention being given to these things I mean as you say the amount of money it's about the sentiment yeah interesting so I'm just to be devil's advocate because I mean I basically agree with you but in the big picture the earth will not stay in a condition that is good for us and you know that

01:11:00 could happen on timescale for a hundred thousand years it couldn't have a lot of timescale million years whatever their respective of how green we become and careful we become an amazon so there is this bigger level question of yep and this is you know one of the excuses someone might ever want must users for going to Mars well you know it's a back-up plan right it's a really long term picture earth-like any planet it's it's good for us now in fact it's been

01:11:30 in a period that has enabled humans to emerge and it hasn't always been like that at all and it won't be like that again the future no matter what we do so I just wonder any that difficulty with there it's really long-term planning and we're not good at that as a speech which is interesting from an evolution point of view because there were fundamental mismatch in the kinds of time scales on which we have evolved and the time scales perhaps it's the contrast between

01:12:01 evolutionary time scales and our lifespan yep maybe that's what it is that is making us such short-term II folks well I mean once you start thinking down those sorts of avenues and maybe this is relevant to one of your future roundtables about the Anthropocene event because we've you know hate or dislike or try to avoid death and you know at an individual

01:12:35 lifetime level we sort of conceived the wise behavior for our species for public policy would be to resist changes in the environment you know there's there's even this idea called as a called Gaia that that the biosphere in general tries to stabilize the environment I don't actually see any evidence at all for that in my opinion but but would that even be a good thing and you know there's this view that you

01:13:07 know the what do they call them when most of the species die out I've lost the phrase the mass extinction has its means its extinction land mass extinctions right there's the idea that mass extinctions are you know that there might be one coming from either human causes or other causes and we'd better do something about it but we wouldn't be here where they're not mass extinctions in the past and indeed you know the whole history of life which were so fond of but not only because it led to us but because I'd like to is the difference

01:13:40 compared to previous mass extinctions that Armenia is the accelerating lever arm that human activity has provided right in I thought this might be a mass tension from which we may not recover at all right and we may not something probably will and it's it does seem to be how fast but I'm not sure it's one faster than you know the asteroid the Crashdown who says that humans have to survive anyway exactly anyway I mean we're gay we have our turn and

01:14:11 we're gonna be gone I mean right example wonderful species could get along he's in the space left by us that has these traits of you know deep thoughts hidden tranquility and you know I have to get out of the way I mean we just don't know or maybe not or are our iPhones floating the gallon gene there's an experiment in cells that proves your point and it has to do with time constants you know you're at what's my lifetime span versus when am I likely to see my next mass

01:14:43 extinction or be a devastating event or something you can do this in cells and it turns out what you do is you put you put drugs in and themselves don't like drugs these are ones that knock the cells out so you put drugs in and you do it sort of periodically and if you do it sort of on a timescale where the cell says okay now time is fine okay now I'm getting hit by drug and back and forth and so forth and then the cell develops these resistance mechanisms on the other hand if the time constant is pretty slow

01:15:14 over their population time they just jettison that stuff they don't need it anymore and I suspect maybe we're we're a product of that too the difference of course it's argued to answer my own question is we have foresight about the future that presumably cells don't tell ya expensive oil so if we cause a mass extinction it may be feeble compared to the one that was caused by when the great ox you know when they you know wouldn't have a synthesis change the atmosphere to an oxygen one but presumably the organisms

01:15:46 that gave off all that oxygen didn't have any way of evaluating what its impact would be in the future so maybe that offers a some greater I don't know responsibility or our race question for me don't wear and is this foresight because we're all made of cells the old place the cell in my body knows the future that somehow I think I know where is that or is that this collective

01:16:17 intelligence I mean it just mean do I see that all right do I know it in relation to the drums table actually I do know a lot of it in relation to the people around this table because they're my sources but that mean maybe it was the aliens we asked a question earlier or made a comment earlier about maybe

01:16:48 these other life ones nonsense to us as important to them so that would raise the challenge how would we ever find such networks if they were interested in what we recall nonsense would they be discoverable even twice yeah I mean that relates also there's a thing in the discussion of SETI and the efficiency of transmitting information between stars and also keeping it secured and so I

01:17:22 think actually this bizarrely enough came up in some conversation somebody had with Edward Snowden Alan Terra for example like in events so this idea that you know perfectly encrypted high efficiency data is indistinguishable from noids so the aliens talking to each other across the cosmos we might not yeah you can't get out and see there's any sort of structured information it's just more cosmic hits that's up I know that's not quite what you were talking about what it created

01:17:53 that thought in my head I don't secure honor

01:18:31 [Music] [Music] okay these this is not a question but a cup you observations directed primarily to document on authority on and dr. dill and then anyone else if you allow the time which is unlikely so know that I reject all right so in terms that the

01:19:01 two for the two factors that I really noticed of course that of anthropomorphism and that of imagination so I'm going to give examples of why this is more important that it may not be apparent to some a few years ago a couple of scientists did not took a mathematical model of Darwinism in order to try to answer the question what is the benefit that death gives and long story short it was discovered that for a particular group not a whole species but

01:19:32 for a group the food resources that are available on a generation by generation basis it extends or diminishes life expectancy so that is the the value is not for the current generation but for the next so that's that's one thing in terms of SETI and radio communications we're a very young species radio waves are the beginning again relatively recently counterfactual entanglement

01:20:03 allows entanglement between particles that never have to interact and it's also secure without using a non quantum key which means that if they're anything like us except hopefully they've been around longer a million years hundred thousand years they may be using counterfactual communications which in fact has been already demonstrated in the laboratory and if they're a little bit like us and

01:20:33 hat didn't destroy their own planet and they're there it may well be the case that there are making assumptions that we also are using quantum communications of that nature which is why we're not hearing a damn thing those we're not there yet it's still in the lesson so I'll just finish with why I'm motivated by it as Einstein say mmm imagination is more important than knowledge because knowledge is limited but imagination and competences the entire universe and that also engages

01:21:05 not just space but time in other words the use of imagination to look at potential futures is not only wonderful but necessary maybe I said anything that it was shut up I said it wasn't a question so I just wanted our response from yourself yeah and you wanted to say something yes yes just very very briefly I would say that many of the more

01:21:36 thoughtful people in the city community have long admitted that our best chance of hearing from classical radio SETI would be of our putative expect us triol civilization with sending signals intended to be easy for us to is wanting to make contact that's why I read earlier rather than us eavesdropping on something they intended for each other or whatever and I can comment on your on your first point

01:22:07 which has to do with longevity and energy investment if you look across species you see exactly that that some species live quite a long time and others live with much shorter time and a lot of this has to do with when do you have babies and so if your physiology is such that you have babies early in your lifespan you will die early so you've just needed long enough to have babies and then after that you're not anymore and so for example we can compare us to species like one that's called the naked

01:22:39 mole-rat which turns out to just live a very long time for example and and what you discover is we if that evolution could have if we look at them of these other species evolution could have designed us differently we could have lived a lot longer but we didn't because this is how long it takes for us to have kids before I ask my question I'll just comment on the SETI project I have a

01:23:11 background in electrical engineering electrokinetic waves are very inefficient form of communication they do not penetrate solid objects or electromagnetic objects like stars so more likely means of communication would be either what the gentleman mentioned quantum communications entanglement or neutrino communications which you know we have no technology that I'm aware of to use neutrino communications but my

01:23:45 point you know the entire supposition that there is extraterrestrial life of any form let alone technological life like us is based on probabilities and the probability of our having evolved on this planet with perfect conditions for us to have evolved it's still practically zero and it took us one third of the life of the

01:24:17 universe for us to evolve to be technological beings if you change one single factor in our evolutionary course if you know if the asteroid had not hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago the dinosaurs with certainly mammals would not be ruling the planet reptiles probably would be and I don't think they would be broadcasting sitcoms to [Music] broadcasting the equivalent of dinosaurs

01:24:50 sitcom a dinosaur which is what yeah maybe that's just before but what the Columbia let's see if I remember my question my question is it took us one-third of the life of the unit of the known universe for us to evolve and extremely unlikely evolution does anybody believe that in the short 14

01:25:23 billion years that the that our universe our visible universes existed that there would be a replication of that evolution or anything comparable to it well there's a missing strong ability how about we just too low and I just say you're making a lot of assumptions and including that we have any idea what the probability is exactly we're here I mean earth might want to comment on that ed has written beautiful papers about this the level of ignorance is

01:25:54 extreme somewhat probability of our own evolution because we know what the steps were I wouldn't and they were truly trillions and trillions of improbable steps this is a major single one and you can I see your point but it's all about interpreting things after the probability of a replication of evolution to a technological civilization within the short because

01:26:31 given this unless you think we started on Mars the probability that we evolved on earth is one we're here that's one so I can tell you an interesting story this is back in 1972 73 Francis Crick the famous guy who discovered the double helix worked with a guy named Leslie Orgel and they put out this idea called directed panspermia the idea of

01:27:01 panspermia had existed a long time before panspermia means that life has existed in the universe before and somehow it ended up here but panspermia the old idea itself was just a it's everywhere and it landed here and that's why we have only one genetic code because there was this one bottleneck and it sort of was the thing that landed on earth and so on anyway what Crick and Orville did was they gave these talks I heard one is a graduate student and then they wrote this as a paper called directed panspermia and directed panspermia the idea is no it's not that

01:27:33 there's just life everywhere in the universe it's that somebody out there is sending something straight to earth for some purpose and that's they're trying to get us going and we could not those of us who were in the audience couldn't tell if these guys were I mean they're they're they were super first-rate scientists both of them whether this will be your leg yeah scientific hypothesis or whether this was a British sense of humor at the end of the day so it turns out this

01:28:03 became quite well known idea this directed panspermia thing in the meantime I think now the whole scientific community has kind of dismissed it including Creek before Crick died he then became sort of an RNA world guy but well just the footnote to your comment footnote the history was not correct with discovered DNA in honor of International Women's Month

01:28:38 extrordinary debate my name is I sleep in bed by the way I run a company called legal genomics and we're building technology to explore the microbiome not just the human microbiome but the microbiome of the earth and for so many ideas I want to try and string together in a very simplistic way I'm not a scientist I'm not astrophysicists I'm not a biologist but I am a cyberneticist and I just want to talk about the gaia thesis first of all you know in a ways i scientific way starting by just making a bit of a contrast so we have most of the

01:29:09 debate today focused on a happy accident Francis Crick's happy accident never to be repeated versus some conversation about determinism I don't know whether anyone has is familiar with Eric Smith's work the idea that the earth is a giant battery and that the citrus cycle is the basis for this chemical breakdown means that life is an inevitability on this planet it's one idea the second idea is you know that's

01:29:40 really an active amorphic and presto centric view of the hollow buoyant because the soil is a microbiome fundamentally plants interacted with the soil we interact with bars etc etc etc so yes I so I just wanted to try and expand on the ideas of determinism Gaia and on the idea of the hollowed by aunt to ask the question about whether might get us a bit closer to understanding what life actually is one

01:30:12 word answer is sure whether yeah I think it's a good question I mean yeah so we have this tendency to to think about things in isolation yo are we linearly right put it in a test tube and study it will understand but of course nothing actually lives in a test tube in the real world and I think I see this coming up also there's a slightly different within field of AI research people talk about oh how do we you know make a general AI that is like us but you're

01:30:45 doing it in a test tube and I don't think that's ever gonna work it has to somehow be out in the complexity of the universe in order to to develop more Skills so I think yeah I don't really have a good answer I'm making a comment to your question yeah absolutely but I not sure how we're gonna fully incorporate the enormous complexity of the entire biological system of the earth maybe maybe one comment there's a lot of complex systems that share a lot

01:31:16 of features and I think we could learn from looking at each complex system and the other one example of this is that surrogate mass loss some years ago was it LBL or BNL sorry bruh Haven looked at software usage how many software packages call other software packages and what it was a story about is that some stuff is really useful writing a

01:31:47 little code that adds two and two and everybody uses that and then there's other codes that are more complicated and so on looked at the complexity of software codes and he then he also looked at the complexity of biochemistry and he discovered the distribution functions of these things are identical it says if by at what we learned from the software looking at the software was that there's sort of swap ability and there's usability and stuff that's really good and useful you just use it as much as you can and there's if there's a broader field -

01:32:18 of what some people call explore and exploit the computational modeling where the idea is you have complexity and you're trying to search a landscape maybe some complicated mathematical function and you're trying to look for the the say the mountain peak or something and how do you find it in the most efficient possible way well what you do is you you do you have sort of two modes one is when you think you're headed up a mountain you just go for it and that's the exploit part and when you don't quite know where you are you're

01:32:48 going up a little and you're going down a little what you do is you just keep doing random things it sort of splits into an entropy like thing and an energy like thing but it's how Monte Carlo people and how people who do supercomputing protein folding in our kind of world for example all kinds of things that function in something somewhat similar ways they find answers in these sort of with the swapping off randomness and an optimization and I think another example of this is industrial innovation if you ask so one

01:33:22 of the one of the examples that comes up often in origins questions that comes up in origins is chicken and egg problem what came first the chicken or the egg well that's of what badly posed problem because chickens and eggs come up together and and so it's not you don't get one or the other and then boom the egg pops open and how comes a chicken for the first time and if you there's there's so and so this has to do with sort of the sequence of events that

01:33:53 things can happen they look at industrial innovation it's very similar to this and also the origin of evolution of the eye for example what's the evolution of the iPhone well you can say well okay let's see is half an iPhone this is the the argument about an eye half an eye would be useless therefore there's no fitness value therefore it couldn't have evolved and it had to have come from some other thing what about half an iPhone well half an iPhone there was half an iPhone but it's not sawing it in half that obviously would be a useless thing half an iPhone was what happened if we

01:34:25 when we started back in 1940's we invented computers we invented transistors we invented GPS we invented Internet those were all the threads so half an iPhone was sort of between 1947 and now what would it have been it was probably half an iPhone was probably an Apple 2 and it was large scale integrated circuits and it was some clumsy version of an internet and it wasn't anything that looked like an iPhone and it was not goal-directed in any way and so I think that the all of

01:34:56 these complex systems there are commonalities that we should be exploiting somehow or another I don't know how to do it and I think your point very well taken though yeah I think the only sort of brief comment I have is that you're absolutely right that probably what we need to consider are networks that facilitate life so connections between conditions so it's a much more complex problem than saying whether you need oxygen or water or you know yeah I sort of would go back and

01:35:28 thinking about the issues you raised under the issues a previous question right is where a little bit back to trying to study dogs with just one example of a dog to look at other I think Eric Smith's works on these cycles are a brilliant description of what happens on earth are they relevant for what's happening on other planets we just don't know I would say and again we have to keep track of what we know and we don't know and we you know that question number two is how different or

01:36:01 similar are we if there is other life out there is I think something that we fundamentally don't know what are the ways we might find out one which I think in has been talking about is we may understand biology and what's happened on earth on a deeper and deeper and more system's level so we can see the patterns that might be the same and of course the other is to search for life elsewhere and if we find it we'll learn such my undergraduate Minter Philip Morrison who was one of the pioneers of

01:36:31 Seti actually once said you know finding a single example of law country anywhere and he said finding life on Mars would change life from a miracle to a statistic so we have to have probably tried both of those I mean we are trying and I think should continue to try to you know advance in both of those ways towards towards answering those sort of questions what's contingent what's convergent but but we shouldn't pretend and it's fun to talk

01:37:02 about this but we just don't know until one of those programs of research succeeds are hopefully both of them thank you I don't know if you discussed this before I got here but my question is about the extremophiles and the types of life you find in sulfuric lakes and in thermal vents and the time something like the tardigrade where you know what what's going on with these creatures and

01:37:33 do they share DNA with us and yeah good question yes they do they share DNA with us they it's interesting there are studies now where you can take a given organism that's a visa file that grows at our campus a let's say and the same organism that's the thermo file equivalent so it does the same things and it has DNA that's pretty similar except it just happens to live at the higher temperatures and you can ask what are the differences and now there's something like 50 different thermo files

01:38:05 for which a lot of proteins are known and understood clearly and so forth it's an interesting process you can rationalize to some extent how the proteins changed and how they became better at doing their folding up and doing their enzyme activities at the other temperatures and so they but they otherwise their organisms just like us the DNA you know across species the DNA is very similar the difference between everybody in this room is about 0.1% in

01:38:36 your DNA the difference between all of us and chimpanzees is about 1% and between us and the great apes is something like 4% and it's the same thing with thermo files and music files the differ those are really small and subtle visually we can't really talk about the absolute requirement for life though in terms of no yes exactly it depends on the environment and also just to add I mean those extremophiles we call them extremophiles many of them do not do well in our environment our

01:39:08 preferred environmental conditions so to them we are the extremophiles okay thank you very much