Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Lee Cronin: The Chemistry of Life ​(#195)

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Lee Cronin was born in the UK and was fascinated with science and technology from an early age getting his first computer and chemistry set when he was 8 years old. This is when he first started thinking about programming chemistry and looking for inorganic aliens. He went to the University of York where he completed both a degree and PhD in Chemistry and then on to do post docs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been since 2002 working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of Chemistry in 2013 aged 39. He has one of the largest multidisciplinary chemistry-based research teams in the world, having raised over $35 M in grants and current income of $15 M. He has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350 peer reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers. http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Audible is hands-down my favorite platform for consuming podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books! With an Audible membership, you can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. The Audible app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. Audible members don’t have to worry about using their credits right away. You can keep your credits for up to a year—and use them to binge on a whole series if you’d like! And if you’re not loving your selection, you can simply swap it for another. Start your free 30-day trial today:  Audible.com/impossible or text “impossible” to 500-500 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:52 Is chirality necessary for life? 00:07:28 What does chemistry tell us about the origin of life? What is life? 00:13:04 What is life? 00:19:14 What came first, chirality or life? 00:23:05 Why is "folding" necessary in biochemistry? 00:25:54 The debate about life between intelligent design and science. 00:38:55 How do you respond to critics of your methods? Where Miller-Urey went wrong. 01:01:33 What would you put in your ethical will? 01:02:54 What would you put on a billion-year time capsule (like the monoliths in 2001)? 01:04:27 What advice would you give to your younger self? 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Some upbeat music for today's guest, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite characters and irascible character in all venues wherever I encounter him online in cyberspace. We have yet to meet in person. He just got back from doing an inside tour off a volcano in Iceland. We'll get to that. We're talking to Lee Kronin. He is professor.

He is the chair, the Regis Chair of Chemistry at a renowned university, the University of Glasgow, where there have been some scientists. Maybe we'll talk about social media and a famous scientist from there, I believe, James Clark Maxwell or not far away, perhaps. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Lee, how are you doing today across the world? Did you survive the volcanic trip? It looks like you held up pretty good. You got a little bit of a tan.

You got a Volko tan. We did get a Volko tan. I was lucky to get the volcano, not in cloud, but in daylight, in sun, and erupting. So it was brilliant. Yeah, some of those drone videos that you shared on Twitter, and Lee is a prolific tweeter, and not just about science, although there's plenty of hard science there, but also about philosophy, academia,

and supporting young people in science, which I really love. And he takes to heart. What I believe is our moral obligation, Lee, I think you share this, that scientists have an obligation to share what we do with the public, because the public pay for basically our adventures, right? So we, let's be honest. You'd be doing this for free, as would I. So anything we get is above and beyond what we really have a right to expect. Agree or disagree. I agree. It is expensive, though. It is. I want to talk about academia as an industry in just a little bit. But I want to

begin with a recap, and I'll put a link to our conversation or the conversation that you graciously provided for my video, Why is DNA Twisted, where you make a very substantial and and delightfully received cameo appearance. And it's to talk about your, what I felt were provocative comments on chirality. But what do I know? I'm just a simple physicist. I'm not a chemist. First of all, we always hear this derogatory thing from physicists like Dirac that, you know,

his equation explains all of chemistry and most of biology or maybe it's the other way around. How do you react to such statements? I think that physics is about to change because physics right now is. pose cannot explain life. And I think that physics, chemistry, and biology are actually the same study. And I think Dirac is actually saying about his equation can't achieve it for reasons we can discuss and it's to do about the operational memory associated with that equation. But physics is changing and I think chemistry and biology need to change with it as well. When you say that it needs to change to accommodate life, would it be something new like a hybrid

in biophysics or something, or would we really change, you know, the equations of general relativity? I think the latter, but I'm not really qualified enough yet. And I would say that physics does the job really well, describes the universe really well, but it doesn't really explain us. But that's not enough yet, because the gaps are not substantial. But there are some kind of some gaps which are probably above my, not necessarily just my paygrave, but also my training. And I don't like to kind of talk about beyond my training.

But as a chemist, I like the second law, but the second law, I don't understand why the universe has to have a second law. And I don't understand why physicists can think there should be an origin of the universe, but yet they can't accept time as a thing. So when you look at Dirac and time, you understand that they didn't get the story. They only understand, it's only post-reductive. It doesn't predict the future. So we need to understand how life emerges from dead stuff, from low memory stuff, from the fundamental particles going up. And I think because physics isn't able to do that yet, there's a gap. And I'm not saying that physics is wrong.

I just always wanted to be a physicist, but I was never smart enough at school. And I'm wondering if they might let me in. Do you have any quotes from chemists, you know, kind of dunking on physicist, or does it only go in one direction? No, I mean, I think chemists think they're the central science, but I think that chemists do the think they do the real material science, again, because there is all this tacit knowledge. But I don't really like to make it a competition because I think the superiority complexes that some people have is anti-science and anti-the-discussion, where I think, you know, some people, very senior physicists you've interviewed, you've had on your podcast, are not, don't make things impenetrable, but, they are so sure of the standard or the core model that they're not open to revision. So one thing, one thing that I think that is really important is that Lee Smolin is correct about time.

And chemists have time built in. Time is a thing. Time comes before space. Where for physics, time is an add-on. It's something you have to use later. And that's a, and that I think where is one of the new, one of the small kinks in the, in the, in the, in the, in the armor that really I would like to get into. As a chemist, I can usefully contribute to rather than saying relative it is wrong.

And I've got a better theory of gravity, which is clearly untrue. I don't. Yeah, especially after your drone fell into the volcano caldera. That was embarrassing. Your exploits with gravity. But I think you're right. You know, physicists almost view atoms as a nuisance. You know, it would be better, cleaner, nicer if atoms didn't exist, right?

time is somewhat more problematic. As you say, there are people that have statements about time, as you noted, and Lee Smollin has an idea about time. And I almost feel like time might be like consciousness. Like, we're not ever going to develop a really solid foundation for either one. It's basically pointless when you hear about things in entropy, the past hypothesis, when you hear about, you know, these are just like last gasps. And I want to get into that. We talk about religion, because obviously religion has a much easier way of establishing initial conditions than physics, math, or chemistry. But you're absolutely right. And I think you have this way of looking at things that is very foundational on one hand, but very grandiose in a good sense, in that you're looking at these big picture topics. And I think, you know, I really didn't appreciate until you and I started our discussions that, you know, time is really intimately connected to these atoms that are so pernicious to physicists in that we really wouldn't have a way. way of distinguishing the past from the future. We always talk about a pendulum, you know, swinging

back and forth. Can you tell me where the pendulum swung back and started swing? No. Can you tell me if the movie's going in forwards or reverse? No, you can't tell me that unless you look at their infrared signature and you see, well, these things are warming up in an atmosphere. Now, if there's no atmosphere, you still can't determine the hour of time. But we put these things in by hand and it sort of feels like it is becoming, you know, hopeless or pointless. And that the more we hear about it, the the more we're getting back to fundamental, so to speak, but then everything kind of has to emerge by fiat. So what do you think is the ultimate, if chemistry were separate from physics, what would chemistry tell us, just as chemistry without relying on physics or time?

What would it tell us about the origin of life? And maybe, maybe first of all, what is life if you were a chemist? Okay, okay. There's a lot there. I think the time question isn't hopeless, but I think that's, I sense that's another podcast. So let's just restrict ourselves to chemistry. I would say what chemistry is able to do is to record configurations of what's happened in a previous point.

And because of the way that conventorial explosions happen, that those commentorial explosions basically start to provide an active memory. I would say the physics has a very low memory to do stuff with. Then chemistry gives you a bit more memory. And so that means you can connect atoms together. You can make molecules, you can make polymers, you can put in sequences, and they can read out current conditions, the environment, and then something about the environment causes those molecules to be challenged, to be burned, turned back into their constituent atoms, or to survive

that, so let's saw that attrition, and maybe somehow act on the other molecules. So what you get is this interaction between matter that's undergoing a increase in the number of bits associated with its history. And then this is what we don't understand. What I think chemistry can offer physics and then maybe biology is that life is not an on-off switch. Life seems to be a continuum of information that is collected in a molecular memory, that is collected in the past and then can act in the future to basically open up the state space. So it's almost why, and that's why my notion of time goes back to physics

because suddenly physics without chemistry has no future in terms of the state space doesn't increase. Chemistry does something weird to what Stuart Kaufman and Sarah Walker and others would call the adjacent possible, in that there are things you can imagine or the molecules can get access to, just merely the act of having access to those configurations allows other things to be possible that weren't possible before. This is a really hard concept, and to start to get there, we have to make the transition from chemistry to biology, but let's keep chemistry. Why is it that chemistry might give the answer to the origin of life? Well, it seems to be that I would say something heretical, even though I'm supposed to be a chemist,

I would say that origin of life on Earth has nothing to do with chemistry per se. It's just the lowest level which life could emerge in a substrate seems to be with atoms connected together on Earth. That's all we know. So that means we have covalent bonds, non-covalent interactions, and we can start to have a memory of the past to unravel the present. And then at some point, when the attrition in the environment, you've got the erosion, things being protected, you've got molecules basically being burnt, molecules becoming bigger and bigger. But then one of those molecules become functional. When they can work together in networks, maybe in a cellular object, maybe in a soap bubble, maybe in a piece of lava, suddenly you have any network. And if that network now can be propagated from one space to another, could that be the first kind of evolutionary dynamic?

In fact, does evolution transcend biology that gets instantiated with the bond? And so I think that chemistry starts to evolve to discover selection and then evolution producing biology. And that's why the origin of life is such an interesting and contentious question. Because it's like you and I saying, oh, let's have a debate about, first of all, we disavis. imagine there's nothing in the sky, we can't see anything except our sun. And we look up and say, hey, Brian, how did that fall? And you're like, well, there's only one sun, isn't there? Right. We need to work out the precise conditions. How much hydrogen? What was a nucleation site? What was collapsing? And we'd be obsessing about whether there was any helium or anything else coming in and maybe chucking

some other elements. But then suddenly someone takes a shroud off and you see stars everywhere. And if you're really lucky, you see stars being born and dying every day in the universe. And suddenly you can think statistically. And I wonder if the problem of the origin of life is we're talking about a single event where we need to be looking at in the universe and say, where's life popping up, where's life dying out? What are the characteristic controls? And how has it instantiated? Yeah, I think you're right. You know, these things always bring up the classic chicken or egg conundrum. And I figured, I actually solved it Lee. I solved the chicken and egg because based on the advice of my 10-year-old, he said, Dad, just order.

chicken on Amazon, order an egg on Amazon, and see which comes first. Then you'll know. But in reality, yeah, these one-off things. And what's the other one-off origin story? It's, of course, the origin of the universe. What's another origin story? Origin of consciousness? These things where we only have one, you know, exemplar, one, you know, sui generis event, process, concept, or or instantiation, you're right. And so I think some of these things are destined forever to the, the, you know, the dustbin of kind of like, well, they were really obsessing about something that's meaningless, and maybe we won't know that until the 23rd century. It doesn't stop us from writing papers and getting tenure and stuff like that.

But what is the simplest thing that's alive? I mean, I hear sometimes a virus is alive. Maybe it's not. I hear AI from my friend Max Tegmark is alive. But what is the simplest thing that's alive? So I would say that that is the wrong question, right? Because I think the thing is, a virus is definitely alive when it's in your cell. And I think my robotic lawnmower is definitely a looks alive when it runs around its electric field and appears to make decisions.

It's not sentient, but it is, isn't it? The robotic designer puts some sentience into it. And so what we're doing is we're thinking about the lineage of life in the wrong way. life is not an isolated phenomena. Life, as my colleague, I think Sarah Walker would say, is a planetary phenomena. So what that means is the planet somehow was able to start producing selection on a planet. And the same were consciousness, actually, and we'll go through that. So you have the origin of life or the development of complexity, starting the evolution,

starting to get module dependency built in robustness. because an astronaut, if Bezos was an astronaut, but John Grunsfeld, a friend of mine, was an actual astronaut. He fixed the Hubble a few times. In fact, he came to my Regis or no creation and showed a video, which would never have an astronaut come to you when you're giving an lecture because they just, I mean, it was brilliant. But what John and I were debating a lot is like,

and the astronaut is in space, is the astronaut alive or dead? Well, functionally, the metabolic, the astronaut is alive, But when the oxygen runs out, the astronaut is dead. And if the astronauts had no children on Earth and they can't get back to Earth and have a family, their lineage is gone. And so what we've got to do is stop. I think we are asking the wrong question about if there's any simplest unit of life. I think it is a continuum.

And there is various module dependencies. So obviously a bacterium. Some bacteria are pretty good. the cindia bacteria made by Craig Venter was barely alive. It had to have all the support system, it had to have amino acids provided to it. He said it was minimal life, but it wasn't. It was kind of a souped up virus.

But our viruses are light. And so I think the question to be replaced is saying, not is something alive or not, but was it produced by evolution? So the AI we have, of course it was produced by evolution, the human program, I built it. Okay, of course. And I think when we start to change the question from what is living to what is evolved,

the question becomes much more clarifying and substantial. And we get away from almost a metaphysical religious discussion to a how can we test for evolution? How can we test for information? How can we test this lineage of possibilities? But is that tantamount to, as I say, giving up? Because at some level, you know, at least in many people's minds, maybe not in a proper scientist's mind. You know, the most interesting question is not, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg, it's essentially, you know, how did the DNA or how did the first living,

whatever you consider, that thing that kicked off the evolutionary process? What was that? What was it? Was it pure molecules in motion? Was it some assembly like John Conway would develop in the computer? Because the claim, of course, as you know, it is, it does devolve into debates about origins and then originators, i.e. gods. So, you know, isn't that kind of shifting the goalpost or the right? No, no. Let me pull it back. No, no. I'm not dismiss. I'm saying life is like the, so the emergence of life in the universe should my feeling is, my hope is, my intuition is, okay, these are all unqualified, we all qualify them, as obvious and simple as the birth of stars. So again, let's not obsess about whether there's a single star.

What I mean is what do we need on a planet for the planet to become involving and living? I'm not saying, so I'm actually saying something far more general, saying it's a bit like I'm trying to characterize the force of selection in the universe, not as in a physical force, but a memory, right, going forward. I think obsessing about the origin of life on Earth is interesting, as much as obsessing about the origin of our sun. But where, how does stars form? Where do they form?

How can we find them? What's the metric? And that's what I'm, so I'm not winding. In fact, I'm narrowing the goalpost to say, does it evolve? Can we get it there? Putting life on Mars? Really complicated. Human life on Mars?

Really complicated. What about putting an origin of life bomb on Mars and making our own Martians? Right? What about making life on the moon? But not trying to force life there to say, what resources, what do we need to do to the stuff so it actually can emerge as a, and I'm not saying you can't have more than one life emerging on the planet at the same time. There's just redundancy built in. No, and just to remind, you know, so the listeners, I'm sure you know this, Charles Darwin,

a man of some renown in the origins of species at least. He wrote in to his friend. he wrote, it is mere rubbish to consider the origin of life. We might as well consider the origin of matter. And of course, my colleagues and I work on that every day, and we understand the process by which matter came into existence. But we don't understand the fundamental conditions that were initiative of the origin of matter. In other words, we understand the processes like you mentioned with the sun and the gravitational collapse and so forth. But we understand the properties of big bang nucleosynthesis. I've done a talk about that on the podcast. but we haven't really gotten to the initial condition. Even inflation is not time equals zero.

And I think those things captivate. But again, it may be kind of the wrong questions to ask. One question I found very provocative in your contribution to my video, why is DNA twisted? We'll put a link to it here or maybe here, whatever handedness I need to use, was that your claim is that the question of whether or not, you know, chirality is needed to produce life

is really not a good one. Can you explain that and whether or not, which came first, the chirality or the life? The life, or the process that gave rise to sufficient symmetry breaking to choose for chirality. And I think I've been thinking a lot about this. The reason for me saying this is actually based upon actually relatively good statistical physics and chemistry. In the universe, if you have a process, well, there's two things you can do, or three, things. Number one, you can have a process that produces stuff that isn't chiral, and then a process can happen to make it chiral, but then you have equal hands. Or you can have a process that will make an

excess. That process to make an excess, as we know from the way the physical interactions require lots of contingency, circularised light will produce things in very low concentrations. So what is more likely a process of some kind of cosmic chiral source or the fact that the process of selection, happenstance in an inorganic environment just so happens to favor one one process over another over many events and it's a bit like a cook flicking a coin it's a bit like me saying hey brian i'm going to give you a coin the more you flick this coin the more like you're the more heads you're going to get so keep flicking it and after a while you'll go from you know equal heads tails to just heads or say here's a coin flick it you're always going to get heads you're going to go oh hang on how did this happen why

where did that information come from? And I think the problem with requiring chirality at the beginning is somehow requiring us to get a really large amount of information. Here's why. For physicists, it's easy to imagine having a left or right-handed process in your, if you're looking at EM wave or something. In chemistry, if you're looking at a molecule, you've got a left or right-hand side, but think of the energy and the information that goes into selecting the molecule,

separating it from the mixture and enriching it and going around in a cycle and doing that and continuing to do that. And when you think about the state machine or the evolutionary machine that's required to do that, the statistics doesn't add up. It can't happen spontaneously. It's like asking for a broken egg to rebuild itself. It could happen if you're a very, very optimistic and long-lived statistician, but it doesn't. The second law doesn't allow it. So the reason why I'm very sure that chirality is not needed is we need energy and fluctuations and processes and that will give rise to a chiral excess as a selection dynamic. Now why?

Well, as life starts to make molecules and configurational spaces searched, there is utility becoming handed because it's easier to fold. It's easier to plug in play. It's easier to have a kind of lock and key relationship with the molecules, whereas if the molecules were disordered, you'd get no selection. So selection produces chirality, and chirality does not produce selection because it's in the wrong. So it's almost teleological in nature. My question I've always had for a biochemist or I know you're technically an in organic chemist, but you dabble a lot in organic chemistry or synthetic synthesis of life.

Why is folding necessary? I mean, I always hear it, it sort of seems just like a totology, like proteins have to fold to activate. And then, but obviously proteins had to be, you know, made originally with, I don't want to get into it anymore. I'm actually quite sick of eggs and chickens and so forth. They make me nausea. It's just, think about the process of assembly. Let's just say we're going to have a polymer. Let's just say the polymer has got some amino acids.

And let's restrict ourselves to a full number. And you want this polymer to fold up, say, into an X or a Y or a Z. Let's just say that. And let's just say the X is good at one thing, the Y is good at one thing, and the Z is good at another. So those folds give you with the same atoms, if you fold different, you get different functions. So it's like a compression. So you're able to use less stuff and just refold it. So that's why proteins are folded.

So they have different function. So now selection in the environment, this polymer is unraveled in some way. It gets folded by the environment and can be good at protection. say let's say it's in a cell from being attacked by something, or it's good for binding a phosphate or a diphosphate or a trifosate for an energy currency to basically provide some free energy. And so what you've got is you need to reuse this material. It's a bit like saying we could make our alphabet bigger. In fact, abandon the need for an alphabet, and we'll just basically teach each other words without any compression.

but it wouldn't be very efficient and there would be a limited amount of sophistication that we wouldn't be, I don't know, we might be to say hello and goodbye and food or whatever or emergency, but we won't be able to say much more. So refolding is like the alphabet of biology to basically say more complex sentences and paragraphs so you can do more.

And that's all it is. Now, if you have chirality in folding one direction, it's just you don't get disorder. It's a bit like it's a property that you have in, in three-dimensional space, you're much better qualified to express than I am of basically organizing material. So the spatial relationship between the objects is conserved such that you can continue to be functional. So your X is good at being as X and your Y is good at being Y. No, that does. And thank you for that lucid explanation. The issue, you know, I want to point out

obviously there are languages like Hawaiian only has 13 characters, 13 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet. And last day, check, we can have great conversations in Hawaiian. They can express all the lavishness and grandiosity of our universe with just those 13 letters. Obviously, DNA has four letters, and you could do anything with two letters, effectively, as you and Sarah have talked about, you know, that this is the ultimate form of compression is not being not being responsible. but really being compressing into as much information as to as little a space as possible. So maybe, yeah, the folding process can be thought of as a compression, as you say. So that's very helpful.

I want to ask now, though, about some of the controversies, again, not to talk about chickens or eggs, but more to talk about debates and debating from a purpose of wanting to come to understanding. And I don't know this guy, Jim Tour, that you guys debated together on Unbelievable. I was on that show with a friend of mine, Steve Meyer. But I take it you guys don't really see eye to eye. And I always have problems, by the way, Lee, with these, you know, when I talk with my friends in the Christian apology, you know, sort of movement and intelligent designers typically are predominantly dominated by Christians. And that, you know, it'll start with something plausible like everything that had a design, you know, had a designer. Then it will have maybe that that designer has a personal stake in your life and in morality and so.

forth, and then Jesus Christ. And that's hard for me because I'm a practicing Jew, as you know, but it's a different, we have different kinds of interpretations of things. And just like you have in your textbooks, you know, you have this, you know, very, very long, thorough footnotes in your papers, your nature paper, which we'll get to. It's very thorough and very well documented because you can't understand it without that. It's not enough to just write this and so forth. And so in Judaism, we have this other tradition called the Talmud, which contains all the hyperlinks to all the information and otherwise it's almost ununderstandable. And so I find it very difficult to talk to people who are dogmatically, you know, wanting to promulgate the Christian

apologetics that, you know, will somehow lead, the teleology will lead from the Big Bang to Jesus Christ. But absent that, your debate, which did involve James Tour talking about Christianity and so forth, was very fascinating to me. But what I always hear are criticisms of his point, and then they'll be retort. So he'll say, you know, you can't prepare these life in a lab, and you can't use that as an analog. Here at UC San Diego, we had Stanley Miller and Harold Uri. They work together here at UCSD. And, of course, the Miller-Uri experiment is, it was very, it's still used as kind of like proof that life can spontaneously emerge from the conditions on the early earth. Now we know the conditions of the earth were not like the Miller-Yuri experiment. That's okay. You know,

they still accept the basic premise could happen. But tell me, where are we, and where is this debate going? They say you need information, that the basis of life is somehow there's some information and there's no source of information without a mind. What was that debate with Jim Torr centered on? So I think you summarized it really well. And the way I come at these debates and say is I'm, I have a lot of religious friends and a lot of people I like to talk to and I kind of have a rule and maybe it's a really crude philosophic rule and say if you can't falsify it, it's not really science, right? And there's lots and it kind of all the borderline, right? There's a bits there and I'm saying if you're coming from a belief point of view, we all have beliefs and the beliefs you either have to

accept until we can work backwards. And there are some beliefs in physics, right? We can't yet falsify, but we're hoping to get there. And what I think Jim was trying to, to do, what James Tor was trying to do, was to mix up the belief, the kind of, that kind of rules of the debate, to kind of, kind of, kind of create a confusion. And I really found that actually quite disrespectful, because actually, I don't know everything. I don't know why we're here. And I think that he kind of lost a really important point, right, where actually origin of life has some big open questions. It's certainly not about. where the maker comes, but actually it's about, I think, the Catholic church realizing that we,

you know, weren't the center of the universe and then what we do in physics going on. And I don't, I don't really understand what his point was other than to say, oh, the cell is so complicated, it couldn't arise by chance. And when you go in your lab and you do experiments, you interact in your lab, therefore you're cheating. And we're saying, well, of course we know we're cheating. And that's the point. Some origin of life chemists are actually cheating and they don't realize it. and that's actually stopping us from getting to the real mechanism. Other origin of life chemists are really obsessing about the geology on Earth, and that's really important.

And we're kind of missing this bigger question. So there's this obviously in every science there's a debate. And physics is about the origin of universe. And so what Jim was trying to do is to take the debate in, I'm not an origin of life chemistry. I want to make life in real time, inorganic life, let's go. Let's make a little star in a bottle, right? You know, I want to demonstrate that the process of making life is possible right now.

isn't somehow weirdly contingent and show it. And then if I cheat to do it, I'll say, well, how much did I need to cheat? Is this plausible on Mars? Is it plausible on Venus? In the same way that if we made a star in the lab, like I think we have tried to do in the fusion labs, say, oh, is it plausible in the universe, right? It's exactly the same argument. So I think that there are many complex parts, but I think that this using the

the fact the cell is so complicated is really a forgets one really important thing. It's a real portrayal actually. It's really nonsensical. And we'll get there. And that is to say this, that life is special on earth, that that's one thing. And it's a one off and never happen again. Well, they don't understand that life on earth is special. It is a one-off because it's a series of unique events. So biology, my argument is confined to earth. There is no, biology elsewhere in the universe because biology is defined by the ribosome DNA, the right helicity, blah, blah, blah. But there's life everywhere in the universe. And when you find an Earth-like planet with the same elements, wouldn't it be wonderful to go and have a look at

what solution has been found on that planet? It won't be exactly ours. It'll be different. And I think that that's only when we start to do that in the laboratory and say, hey, Jim, look, we've made life, but it's not what you think. It's another one. Look, isn't that weird? Isn't our ribosome different. And I think when we start to see that, we'll push the debate back more constructively. But origin of life is kind of trapped in this, we must take the car and decompose it and say, where did the steering wheel come from? Where did the door come from? And so there's a lot of different complaints going on there. And I think the intelligent designers are being fairly nefarious. And when I realized that, I just disengaged and said, well, look, hey, I know I'm an

educated idiot or I'm not an educated idiot. I'm educated to understand what I don't know. And what we have to understand is how to reduce that uncertainty. And that's where that debate kind of, you know, I don't know what you felt about it, but I felt that slightly, you know, disrespected. And, you know, it was obviously for his crew, right, for his people following him. Nevertheless, I think, you know, there's always this, you know, God of the Gaps pushback on the religious. But there's almost an equivalent, you know, god of the multiverse of the gaps or pansevermia of the gaps or Miller-Yuri of the gaps. And I do feel like sometimes it can go too far on the other side. And I wonder if you could, you know, Steelman, if you were channeling your James Tour, it doesn't sound like you want to.

But, you know, when you hear about these things like Mitchio Kaku's new book, the God equation, he was on. my podcast. I'll put a link to his episode over here. At the end of it, he talks about, you know, Thomas Aquinas' questions about design. And he basically says that like evolution created life. And it doesn't sound like too far off from what you were saying. I don't believe that you, you know, I think it's semantic in some level, but I think if I could summarize you, it might be things that are alive are processes that participate in evolution. Either they're the creator of it. They engender it. They engender it. They manifest it, they instantiate, whatever you want to say, they participate somehow in evolution.

However, you know, on their side, they're saying, well, you don't have evolution without information. You have DNA. It has information. You find a watch. It was obviously put together. Even Fred Hoyle, who is a famous, you know, atheist most of his life, he made the 747 argument. He made arguments about, you know, the fine-tuning of, as we know, the carbon miracle that allows carbon to form in this very narrow resonance. the Hoyle residents. So can you steal man their position? I mean, is there anything besides the God of the gaps that, you know, they have going for them? Or is it really, you know, just a matter of time before we, a scientist, really come up with an answer to these ultimate questions,

which I think are deservedly given that title. I think you're right. We will come up with a solution to that. And I think it is hard to steal man it. But I'll do one because I think we should. We'll do one because actually that plays into what I'm trying to do as well. well in trying to de-anthropomorphize the origin of life studies. So right now we're saying, okay, it's easy to imagine that once we solve for RNA,

that basically the problem is done, okay? And what I would argue from their point of view is RNA is quite a complex molecule, and it's hard to get there. And why are we demanding RNA? What we should be saying, because the RNA is saying, no, hey, we don't care about RNA. In fact, we don't care about the molecules at all. What we care about is the process of selection.

Selection starts with, you know, quarks. Here it does. There's just not many states to go, right? It's just, as you know, then you get your atoms, and then you get your bonds, and when you get bonds, you get molecules. And when you get molecules, you get a commentary explosion, and then you can get selection. And as soon as you get selection, you start to kickstart the process of evolution.

And what biology is, biology is merely a, an efficient funnel for fast evolution. And it's a bit like the slow accretion of information. And I think what we have to do with the steel manning of the, oh yeah, the RNA looks improbable. But then when we realize that RNA is improbable, but we go all the way back, but we don't need information at the beginning. We just need molecules bumping into each other in some rock, some symmetry breaking that occurs naturally accretion of that and suddenly random fluctuations turn into information. How?

So let's say I randomly push a piece of snow down a hill and it bounces off a wall and builds a snowman. I only recognize that to me a snowman after the fact, right? It's suddenly that random event. But let's say building a snowman allows a snowman because it can then, I don't know, tumble over in a certain way, can make other snowmen. And suddenly, that and that snowman can then go back to the top of the hill and make another one. So when a random process gives rise to a replication randomly that stabilizes that process, so it can go back and then undergo selection through mutation, that's how you get life from nothing.

And that is what we have to do in the laboratory, nothing less than going from, we have to literally break the second law, but we don't. The second law doesn't need to be broken. because time exists, and when time exists, you don't need a stupid second law, right? But you then show this accretion of information, and that's how it works. And to get away from time and breaking second law, just provide some energy. So if you have an energy source and stuff, you will get memory over time if you get a combinator explosion in molecular space.

So that's kind of a way of actually still mailing it, say RNA is not the answer, and then showing how chemistry can provide roots to not just one origin of life, but many. And my job, my colleague's job, the job of science, we need to go make life in the lab, many different life forms, not just based on this life we know now, but it will be different. And that's going to be exciting. If I can go to my lab tomorrow and show that evolution can occur in a completely different system, even if I created it, I think I would be able to convince most skeptics about origin of life, not the had a religious angle, that the phenomena selection is beyond, works beyond biology, a round bottom flask, a piece of glass, a cavity,

some energy, some stuff. I think no one will be denied me. What do you say to those that say, you know, well, we have no example of life being produced from these situations, even if you were to do it, you know, the Craig Ventner, who's a neighbor, you know, kind of in La Jolla, to UCST, you know, those that say, well, you started with these highly purified reagents that you bought from Alditch or Fisher, and then you put it in an autoclave test tube. And it wasn't like Darwin's little warm little pond very much at all, right? So what about that objection? Well, well, so that's very important.

And that's what I'm saying. I'm still manning it from the RNA point of view, that is correct. I don't like that. I think it's too much like saying, trying to understand someone's art exhibit. And they say, oh, they put this here because that reason. No, well, we're doing my lab, and this is where Miller-Uri went wrong, right? And this is where Origin of Life actually became a origin of life, an astrobiology is still pre-paradine, right?

We don't know what life is. So it's great that people love it and working on it, but we just don't know what it means. It's like the same problem in electricity, right? We know there's sparks out there. We know there's charge carriers, but we just don't know what life is. So what I'm doing in my lab and lots of new labs are doing is we are generating the simplest taking the simplest molecules, so least number of bonds, and basically turning them into crap, just baking, making tar, just making a mess. And then showing over time recursively in cycles

that that mess, not only doesn't get messier, it gets simpler and more complicated. So this is really important. You're saying, well, hang on, but isn't a mess complex? Sure, but a mess is A mess is not highly complex, it's just a mess. So what I mean is, let's say I give you a budget of a trillion carbon atoms. You could just make a trillion, you know, a few hundred thousand molecules. But if suddenly I could take those carbon atoms and funnel them into one molecule to make, say, I don't know, let's say taxol, which is one of the, you know, a natural product from Pacific U-Tree, which is a very good anti-cancer drug, it's got a very particular structure, beautiful molecule.

If I could funnel all that into a complex molecule, then an evolutionary process had to produce it. So what we need, simple stuff, carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen, milliuri, go for it. Where milliuri went wrong, and we did this in my lab, is they didn't have the Earth's crust. They had no real way of accelerating doing catalysis and no cycles. It was just a snapshot. It was an obvious commentaryal experiment for me, not for them. It was paradigm shifting, not to do it. take it away from your colleagues. So now what we need to do is millyuri type chemistry in a

random environment, a mineral environment, recirculate and then see how selection starts and look at that explosion of a mess and say, look, mess. And then keep going, keep going. Say, oh, gosh, the mess is simplifying. Less components. But hey, look at the average complexity of the components. It's going up, up, up, what's going on. And that is the marker that we're looking for in the lab right now, which will indicate that evolutionary dynamic is becoming established. It's akin to, I'll do it in Lego analogy, because I love Lego. We make all these layers, let's make Lego Star Wars, Millennium Vulcans, Thai fighters, everything. And you say, right, I think the origin of life people just love Star Wars.

They say, I'm going to make a Millennium Falcon. You know, that's my template. I'm going to find a way of making there, right? So they're adding in the... Vulcan is a different series. The Millennium Falcon, I'm sorry. A falcon. But then I'm saying, hey, let's have no bias what we want to make.

We're going to put all the Lego blocks in a big fat and stir them, and they'll just make a mess. But if you keep stirring and you have a template, suddenly the Lego will accrete and grow. And some of that Lego that happens to replicate itself, as you know, in statistical physics, you'll have a phase transition around the system, and suddenly you'll start to generate complexity in kind that staircase. case. And I think that's what we have to do in the lab. Nothing more and nothing less. We have to generate complexity from nothing using energy and stuff. And so you and I talk a lot about, you know, when you're my kind of, what do you call that guy, Serenade of Bergerac, you know, you kind of provide me

some tips to talk to my biology colleagues when they come on the show and that's really helpful. And you're always respectful about it. You always ask, what's the crisp test? What's the test for which there will be found evidence to either substantiate or refute X, Y, Z's claim. And I've had on a lot of physicists that deal in traffic in the origin of time, origin of life. And you've helped me kind of framework and get the proper framework for some of my questions. I thank you for that. But I want to ask you, science by its nature is necessarily tended to. In today's age, I want to do a thought experiment with you. Take you back to your countrymen, a young James Clerk Maxwell, and he's operating in 1864. And he comes up

with four equations which Oliver Heaviside and others would later transmute to the world, literally, and revolutionize our understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the unification of forces as well. And these are the course of the famous Maxwell's equations. There's four of them and they're beautiful. Now imagine Maxwell's around and Twitter somehow was around back then. And Maxwell is there and he, like you, is a Scotsman who's not afraid to tweet and share his bold opinions and his genius with the world. And so he says, I have this new theory and I know what you're going to say, but the way that it works is there are these little gears and there are these little whirlpools in space and there's this ether type substance and we don't understand that.

And then he would have roundly been laughed out of society, right? And we would have had a complete, complete devastating effect on our understanding and progress in physics. You talk a lot about, you know, kind of ideas and how to test them. But imagine we applied the Cronin test to Maxwell in 1864. He would have flunked it because there aren't no little gears and stuff. And so you would have thrown the egg out with the bathwater, right? So tell me, Lee, where do we draw this line between necessarily tolerating a theory for some amount of time versus, putting the hammer down early so that we can get onto right thinking in a more proper fashion. Yeah, that's a really, I mean, that's not just a question for kind of, you know, chemistry.

It's for all science, right, for the way we're doing this. And I've been, I mean, I've been thinking about this for a very, very long time and worrying for all my, my entire career, I've always wanted to kind of get to this point where I wanted to make a life form and understand I've made it, right? So this is a big problem right now is like, I could go in my lab and say, hey, Brian, just come to my lab, isn't it cool? We've got chemistry. Everyone will be like, cool, chemistry even looks like you've got some life form. And I say, well, I've got this life form. Look, and you'll be like, we'll prove it. I mean, how do I know that this is done anything? You're just not faking me out.

You haven't just added something in. And I think that that's, that process you describe, how can we allow the idea to be played with? So what is my, what is my theory? So my theory is that selection occurs in the universe naturally, but until you make organic molecule, until you make molecules that can store information by happenstance, that you can't get selection. So what I need is molecules, and then I get selection, and selection acts on a commentary explosion, and then reduces it somehow in a network and start to produce a dynamic growing, get selection. You're like, rightly, great, great idea. You know, ether, cogs, how do we do it?

So what I realized many years ago, and I suppose I invented the theory much longer ago than I'd actually realized, I invented a theory called an assembly theory. And it came like this, which was, I got really fed up with information theory in physics and computer science. Because everyone kept using the observer. The god in the physics was the observer looking down and counting and assigning states. And I was like, well, imagine the observer emerge. So what I wanted to try and do is to say, okay, if I want to, if I find a molecule, how do I know that molecule? And this is the bad word, but we're now, because we're talking about Jim Tor and the steel manning things, how do I know the molecule has had a creator or has been created by an evolutionary dynamic or is produced randomly? And this actually, this was a question I played with for many, many years. And what I realized, and I'll take a segue, so I'm going to go back because the problem is this, we have, we have, Some people saying there's phosphine on Venus as evidence of life. Could be, but does life on Earth produce phosphine?

No, not really. Not at all, in fact. Not proven. So it's weird. Yeah, yeah. We've found it associated with my, basically, phosphatine is produced when you have a reducing agent and some phosphate. So they've found phosphine in bird feces and in some bacterial masts.

Of course, it's reducing agent. You add it to phosphate, it makes a smell. That's not the same thing as saying biology makes phosphates. because it doesn't. Biology makes carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane, all sorts of things, but it doesn't really make phosphine. It might by accident make phosphine, but not by design. So then there's an argument, right? Let's not dismiss it. Let's say phosphine is a viable biomarker. Then let's talk about the Viking mission. Then let's talk about arsenic DNA. All these things suffer from this same problem. So I was inspired by the CERN machine,

how they are brilliant, right? We've got this thing. We've got this, theory of the way the universe works, right? There's a standard model. Play with a standard model a bit and we can simulate how that standard model may work. Now, if we've got a simulation, we can build an experiment. We'll build an experiment and we know what energy range to go to. And for like 30 or 40 years, like, yeah, good energy range. Thanks for that two billion euros or Deutsche Mark or pounds, can you give us another fine and we'll get the Higgs? You know, we'll go to 128 or whatever GV, and we'll find it. And I was like, oh gosh, we don't have a standard model of life.

We don't have a, so we don't have a theory of life. We don't have a model. We don't have a machine. So I've taken a bold step and said, right, my model is selection in the universe, in molecules. I'm now going to say, how much do I need to simulate it? And I'm going to think about to then have a simulator. And then I'm going to make a machine in my lab and I need a detector. In your case, it was detecting a peak energy spectrum or whatever, I'm going to detect complexity.

How do I do it? And that's how he came in the molecular complexity idea. And I worked backwards. I said, right, I'm going to take molecules that I can only find in biology. Let's take natural products. So if we take something like taxol, taxol is relatively big molecule. And the formula is like, let's say, 62 heavy atoms. And they have to be in one configuration.

The chance of you getting those atoms together in that configuration is basically infinitesimally small, less than one in a mole. So what that means, if you find taxol in any detectable amount, there must be a process that made it. And can I then detect the complexity of taxol? Well, yeah, I use an instrument I made in my lab. It uses a thing called a mass spectromet and you cut the molecule up in the fragments. It's a bit like you take an iPhone and hit it with a hammer gently enough to not destroy it, but to break it open so you can count the pieces and go, oh, there's something in there, boom,

count, break it. And you can select the iPhones. So what I've come up with is a way of determining the intrinsic complexity of a molecule and making a metric for it. And that's what we did for astrobiology. And we're now using this system to go and look for life in the lab. and I'm pretty confident that we will generate evolutionary dynamics and then larger that scale. So how we tested it, I'm kind of jumping a bit.

We had this theory for the complexity of molecules. It's intrinsic. You do not need to know anything about the molecule. It just tells you about the number of different bonds. So you can select the molecule. That's one thing. Then we then went and looked at it. We just took six million compounds from around the planet and just characterized them.

And we then took a load of sample, we then went to the lab and got molecules of all the complexity scale and measured it using mass spec. Did the actual experiment, did the theory, we got a nice correlation. Then we then got a load of samples from outer space around the earth and biology. NASA gave us samples and they even blinded it because they didn't believe us. They gave us Merchison and we used the detection system. And we found, long story short, that everything that was abiotic or dead had a low complexity or assembly number. number less than 15 and stuff that was alive had the assembly number going all the way up. And it almost like a threshold on earth.

And getting that paper published was so difficult because everybody, all the chemists said, it's impossible. We don't believe. We don't believe that complexity you need. Complexity can happen for free in chemistry. So it's like saying, so the chemist was saying to me, the referees were saying, oh no, we're allowed to break the second law. You can get information for free.

So I actually found myself saying to the editor, hey, guys, we have an intelligent design problem in chemistry. Synthetic chemists are, and obviously they're not. It is a cultural thing. And chemists are used to making molecules. To say to a chemist, molecules on earth that aren't touched humans or biology hands are really simple, is really a hard thing to grasp or accept. So that's kind of how we've got around it. We've had to make my own theory, my own model, and the molecular complexity is now out there,

and people are hopefully going to try and break it and use it. So in that fascinating same vein, you, your group, your collaborator, Sarah Walker, and others, you're the last author on it, but maybe you should talk about what that means in science, but it's called identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry. This is a paper in nature, which starts off with the word alien in it. And what do you make, first of all, Lee, of all this fascination that is in the zeitgeist about alien life? Yeah, I think, well, there's a really interesting cultural debate going on right now,

and like with the U.S. releasing all these reports. And what I try to do and talk to people about UFOs and aliens is to say, well, hey, hang on. Is it likely that UFOs have been visiting us? Maybe not. but let's not be too dismissive, but let's understand what it is you're interested in. And I think rather than me being as dismissive to the UFO kind of believer as to the intelligent design believer and say, hey, what are you looking for? Why are you interested? Because the thing that I miss, I think maybe the thing I missed with Jim is to not just to argue

from a point of view of science is going to solve the problem to say, ah, you want meaning as much as I do. And in the UFO, I think the UFO thing right now is exposing, you know, people, kind of how they react. And let's say we are successful. We understand, let's say we understand the origin of the universe where life is likely to be. And we find new life forms. How is that going to, or we make it on Earth? How is that going to affect humanity in our society? So I actually think that the current zeitgeist is really interesting, although I think it's unlikely that UFOs are visiting Earth for all sorts of good reasons. reasons that you've debated and I'm certainly, you know, I'm not going to say that things are,

the impossible is really impossible because let's not do that. That would be against the podcast after all. But I would like to think about the bounds of possibility. So I think that people really want to know this stuff. They want to know if they're alone in the universe. They want to know if aliens exist. So if I can use, if I can make an alien in my lab, like as in an alien is a new life that uses different elements and looks different, that will be profound. If I can then help NASA or ESSA or anyone find life in the solar system, most likely in the outer solar system, I'm willing to bet your house, not necessarily in my house, on the fact that chemistry will be different.

Really sure. And if we find that, it's going to tell us something really profound about our place in the universe and our own meaning. And I think, you know, Jim and you and myself and my colleagues, all entitled to our own little bit of meaning, but let's share it in such a way that we can expand the horizons because we need to understand where humanity is going. If life is a planetary process and global warming is a result of everything that's going on, how can we work together to avert the coming problems associated with it? How can we do all these sorts of interesting

things? So the fundamental science meaning that we get paid for, what we would do for free, as you point at the beginning, suddenly becomes really relevant to people saying, well, what am I? What am I doing here? And I love doing that. I mean, I love that debate. And I think it's important to be open-minded and respectful. Yes, indeed it is. Let's talk about this paper.

We only have a few minutes left in this fascinating conversation. We're going to have many more, I hope, maybe in person someday, identifying molecules as biosignatures leading off with the word alien in the very first sentence, which is rare. I mean, I've had a lot of papers rejected from nature. Maybe I should put aliens in the title or in the abstract. Talk about this, making de novo life in the laboratory, and what is this possibility that you and Sarah and your wonderful team have really maybe unlocked for potential use for the first time in history. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining

set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies, priceing valid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. Yeah, I mean, it's a big team effort. And I'm, I I think it's really interesting the way it's come about because I think that I like kind of the collaboration with Sarah's team because they were just really interesting in life as a phenomenon and willing to kind of take a step back. And then my own team, when I developed assembly theory, I developed it on my own, right? It's the one thing I developed one day walking down the street and then I had to then work and it was just one of those ideas.

And ideas are cheap. We all know that. Well, then with my team, they then basically he wrote the algorithms, did the mass spectator, and we validated the theory with Sarah's team. We got NASA involved. So all of that teamwork really came together nicely, and it allowed us to really put down three key points. We allowed to come up with a new theory of assembly, which I think is going to be, it's not just about,

it's going to replace entropy, right? We're going to stop using entropy, and we're going to start looking at assembly, which is going to really mess people up for a while. I'm not saying entropy, entropy just tells you what you lost. Assembly tells you what you have, which is kind of cool. Because there is no, in assembly theory, what it does, basically, I haven't actually explained

what the theory is. The theory says, if I've got a given complex object, or if I've got a given object, and I break it into its atoms, B.M. atoms or Lego bricks, what is the shortest and unique way I can get to that object, right, by doing the least number of symmetry operations? And so, and I'm allowed, once I know a piece of, a make of motif, that exists in the memory, the lineage. So it's a bit like, so the way you would take the word abracadabra, you then, I actually got the word abracadabra into one of the figures of the paper. And I show that abracadabra, you can actually make by putting all the letters today, or you can say take an A, B, an R and A, and then put it all together and show the assembly of abracadabra. So what assembly theory is, it's like what you'd call Coma Goloff complexity, which is like, look at what is the smallest program we could use to write it, but it does something different.

Coma Grosov complexity requires an observer. What assembly theory says is what is the minimum steps I need to make on a random walk. So it gives you a lower bound to make the molecule, so the number of steps. So what we did probabilistically is if you do more than 15 steps, unique steps, the chances of you doing that in the molecular space is less than one in a mole. So a mole is a number of molecules in a mole of say of the compound. So if you take water, the molecular weight of water because it's H2O, two hydrogens and one oxygen is 18. 18 mils of water is 18 grams. In 18 grams of water, there are 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules.

That's a lot of molecules. So with a molecule assembly number of 15 or higher, there would be only one molecule in that mole that would have that assembly number. So that then allows us to give us the probability. And then we then did the probability, got the model, and then went into the lab and actually developed the experiment. And in this paper, we use mass spectrometry. But we also show it can work for infrared.

Now, this is where suddenly the astronomers start to go, oh, we can start to observe infrared of exoplanets. Maybe we can start to look at high assembly in exoplanets one day and stop worrying about, you know, one-off markers. So this kind of entire paper allowed us to say, posit a theory, have a model, and then have a test. Applied as a life detection, but really Sarah and I are going much deeper. assembly theory tells you about how physics turns into chemistry and how chemistry turns into biology. That is fascinating and, of course, the ultimate issues of life. And Lee, we could talk for hours, but I don't want to miss the final thrilling three questions that I ask all my treasured and guests that honor me with their presence. And so I will now ask you, Lee, are you ready to go into the impossible?

Yes. All right, my friend. We begin with the end of your life, which will happily, hopefully not occur maybe ever, but certainly not until the biblical age for righteous people, which is 120 years. That's the age Moses lived to, for those of you questioning at home. And I want to ask you, when you depart this mortal coil, as the bard said, what would you put in your ethical will, not your material will, where all that funding goes to your students so they can keep the lab going? But where would you, What would you put in your ethical will for the influence to the betterment of humanity after your gun? I would like to make sure, or put in my ethical will, enough information that would change the future of the universe, right, in terms of the ability to make humanity more sustainable on Earth or to make sure we could generate origin of life algorithms so we can make sure that our culture or some, you know,

I'm turning into Ridley Scott, right, that terrible movie Prometheus, but finding some way of changing the future state of the universe in a way that makes life more exciting for our children and their children and more sustainable, but I think making it exciting because what life seems to do is it likes to make things more complicated and more interesting. So if I could do anything to make that happen in a good way, rather than the destruction that's the destruction that some people did. That would be my, that would be my dream. And maybe that dovetails nicely into the next question, which is about the far future of all of humanity, not just specifically those of your biological and ideological progeny. And that has to do with what Arthur C. Clark had in the

Sentinel Monolith, these kind of strange, almost menacing objects that persist and are first encountered by early hominids in the plains of Africa and later are found on the the moon and we don't really know what they're for. Maybe there are time capsule, maybe there are a warning. What would you put on such a billion year long lasting time capsule? What was the culmination perhaps of scientific knowledge that has been accrued that you'd like to preserve for all time? So I think this is a bit weird, but somehow I'd like to capture in some kind of motif, the ability for a life form to take a selfie. Because I think that We don't yet understand consciousness, but it isn't it interesting that we all like

tell things selfie. So if I could somehow immortalize TikTok, I'm doing that now. I'm going to put it on TikTok. I'm going to put a TikTok or the equivalent of TikTok on that monolith. I don't think you've ever had an answer like that before. But the ability to self-reference, if I could find an object in the universe and say, my gosh, this object is the product of self-reference. Oh, no, I'm not alone in the universe and wasn't alone.

The universe did something for me. It's like John Archibald Wheeler's universe looking at itself with an eyeball over the letter U, which is an edge is a diagram. So simple, even I can recreate it on occasion. Lee, the last question involves the name of this podcast. And now we're going to go backwards in time, violating the second law of thermodynamics, that you love and treasure so much. No comment.

Okay, going backwards in time, Sir Arthur C. Clark's third law states, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way pass them into the impossible. That's the origin of my podcast name, where I am here at UC San Diego, the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. I want to ask you, Lee, what mysterious aspect of life perplexed to you as a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, whatever? What epiphany? What great moments of clarity would you tell to your former self to give you the courage to go into the impossible? Advice to your former self. I think, yeah, I've taken the advice, but a little later, is having more confidence to expose my mathematical intuition when I was much earlier, because actually it's quite, although I'm relatively reasonable chemist now, I think it's quite hard for people to take my graph theory seriously because it's something that mathematicians do when they're really young. And for someone to have a new insight in their late 40s is kind of, you know, it's a bit late. But I think, but I think,

the experiments will work and that's fine but i would say if i could just have the confidence to basically be even more bashful and um fearless than i was i would just maybe have done that a little bit more earlier i really love cutting across the disciplines um i just wish i've done it earlier well lee i'm thankful you did it at all some people never do it and i'm so glad to know you and connected to you on clubhouse and twitter wherever else we're connected uh i want to thank you for sharing some of your insight, your foresight into our most important questions, the biggest issues in cosmology, in physics, in biology, and chemistry, and beyond. Thank you for sharing that with my audience, and thank you for being a friend of science. Thank you very much for having

me on. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium

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for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Velko and Brian Heating. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming,

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