Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 1 of 2: Brian Keating Λ Lee Cronin on Life in the Universe, Assembly Theory, and the Meaning of Time -A debate on Curt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything YouTube Channel ​(#210)

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Visit our Sponsor LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE!Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Watch the debate here on Curt's channel https://youtu.be/BI7-5YnXSqk LINKS MENTIONED: -Brian Keating's Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating -Brian Keating's "Losing the Nobel Prize": https://amzn.to/3AyXMyE -Brian Keating's "Into the Impossible": https://amzn.to/33IjsfC -Brian Keating's Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating -Lee Cronin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/leecronin -Brian Keating's appearance on Lex's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhGwJ... -Stephon Alexander podcast with TOE: https://youtu.be/VETxb96a3qk TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:59 Brian Keating's opening statements 00:08:21 Lee Cronin's opening statements 00:13:45 Why defining "life" is difficult 00:23:43 Disagreements on the origin of life 00:38:12 The definition of Entropy is "wrong" (controversial claim) 00:51:44 The universe is filled with life Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, crossover episode from Kurt Jymungle's Theory of Everything podcast, which you can find on YouTube. There'll be a link in the video description below. This particular episode was recorded in January of 2022 and featured myself in conversation with Lee Cronin. We had a debate fighting toe to toe about theories of everything in the field of origin of life. And I think this topic is timely because of pertains to things like aliens, UFOs, UAPs, the Pentagon, many other things, that Lee believes to be ubiquitous and I believe to be unique to us. So that kind of rhymes. That's kind of interesting. But anyway, I think you'll really enjoy this special episode with my friend. Make sure to check out Kurt's channel, like and subscribe over there on YouTube. Theories of Everything or Kurt Jymongle will have links below in the show notes. And otherwise, I hope you very much enjoy this wild somewhat speculative ride into the impossible with my good friend Lee Cronin moderated in a toe-to-to-head-to-head battle debating in a friendly fashion but it gets

heated at some points with my friend Lee Cronin this is part one of a two-part special episode any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic open the pod bay doors help Brian Keating is a distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and is also a member of Avi Loeb's Galileo Project, assisting for the search for alien techno signatures across the cosmos. Brian also has his own podcast exploring physics from the theoretical end to the experimental end, and he has the record of interviewing the most Nobel laureates. Links to his podcast are in the description. Lee Cronin is the Regis Chair of Chemistry in the University of Glasgow.

And in addition to having a velvety accent that I highly covet, he's published over 450 papers and pioneered a new quantitative measure of complexity called assembly theory. This allows one to look at a molecule and categorize its complexity, perhaps even with mass spectrometry, and then determine if it's sufficiently complicated enough to have been produced solely as a result of an evolutionary process or by chance, but you can measure that, and thus that greatly aids the search for life outside of Earth. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro.

My name is Kurtzai Mungle. I'm a Torontoian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything. From a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as analyzing consciousness and seeing its potential connection to fundamental reality, whatever that is. Essentially, this channel is dedicated to exploring the undarived nature of reality, the constitutional laws that govern it,

provided those laws exist at all and are even knowable to us. If you enjoy witnessing and engaging with others on the topics of psychology, consciousness, physics, etc., the channel's themes, then do consider going to the Discord and the subreddit, which are linked in the description. There's also a link to the Patreon. That is patreon.com slash Kurtzai Mungle. If you'd like to support this podcast, as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reasons that I'm able to have podcasts of this quality and this depth, given that I can do this now full time. Thanks to both the and the sponsors support. Speaking of sponsors, there are two. The first sponsor is brilliant. During the winter break, I decided to brush up on some of the fundamentals of physics,

particularly with regard to information theory, as I'd like to interview Chiarra Marletto on constructor theory, which is heavily based in information theory. Now, information theory is predicated on entropy. At least there's a fundamental formula for entropy. So I ended up taking the brilliant course. I challenged myself to do one lesson per day, and I took the course's random variable distributions and knowledge slash uncertainty. What I loved is that despite knowing the formula for entropy, which is essentially hammered into you as an undergraduate, it seems like it comes down from the sky arbitrarily. And with brilliance, for the first time, I was able to see how the formula for entropy, which you're seeing right now, is actually

extremely natural, and it'd be strange to define it in any other manner. There are plenty of courses, and you can even learn group theory, which is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard model is predicated on U1, cross-sU2, cross-sU-3, those are lead groups, continuous league groups. Visit brilliant.org slash totoe to get 20% off an annual subscription, and I recommend that you don't stop before four lessons. I think you'll be greatly surprised at which you can now comprehend subjects you previously had a difficult time grocking. The second sponsor is Algo. Now, Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software that helps business users, optimize sales and operations,

planning to avoid stockouts, reduce return and inventory write-downs while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI, headed by Amjad Hussein, who's been a huge supporter of this podcast since near its inception. In fact, Amjad has his own podcast on AI and consciousness and business growth, and if you'd like to support the Toad podcast, then visit the link in the description to see Amjad's podcast because subscribing to him, or at least visiting, supports the Toe podcast indirectly. and enjoy. Is that an aura ring? I got mine here. I joke this one. Do you see this one? No.

That's the fourth generation. It's stealth. Ah, I get it. Okay. Do you have any words for me before we go live, by the way? Any of you? Just no, I mean, I think we can make it kind of funny and, you know, say we're going to have a nice fun. Brian is in denial, but is alien abduction. We'll say we'll have a nice clean toe-to-to-to-fight. You're going to I have a theory of everything versus theory of everything. Life, the universe, and everything. Okay, so if you can see this type, Rockles, Modern Life. Rockles, Modern Life.

This should be live now. Brian, you can confirm that for me. Yes, it is live. It is? All right. Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you.

Thank you all for being here. To the audience and to, especially to Professor Keating and Professor Cronin. Thank you. pleasure to be here good to see you lee hi how's it going guys how about you both start with your opening statements brian you can go first okay well first of all i'm wishing uh that this will be a nice clean toe-to-to-to battle uh that we won't resort to any bloodshed like our last confrontation with now lee lee has been on my channel he's a gracious gentleman i enjoyed having him on I refer people to check out that conversation.

He's given a TED talk that was surely inspirational that came out 10 years ago on my 40th birthday. So you guys can do some quick math. And Lee hasn't changed a bit. I've got some gray beard hairs, as you can see. But the reason I suggest, Kurt said, you know, you can have any guest, you know, to have a theocution, which is appropriate for gods like us in man form. and I said, there's no one I want to go toe to toe to with more than my good friend Lee Cronin

because I have tremendous respect for his intellect, for his character, for the fact that he's an experimentalist. He's a chemist, not a physicist, but he, that's okay. Some of my best friends are chemist, and he does experimental work. And that's very rare, Kerr, as you know, you have theories in your name of your podcast. We hear a lot more from the theorists. We hear from Mitch Eokaku, from our buddy Eric Weinstein, from our buddies, you know, Brian green and all the like, but we rarely get to hear from experimentalists.

So one of the niches I like to hopefully fill in is to bring an experimentalist standpoint to it, which is first and foremost driven by evidence. And I'm hoping that today, if Lee agrees, that we'll kind of take a tour through what we know about the universe, what we know we don't know about the universe, specifically restricted to life, which is Lee's domain much more than mine. but I want to bring an experimental observational astrophysics perspective to things, and even touch upon the things that inspired me as a 12-year-old kid to get my first telescope, which is the biggest question I think there is.

Even though I study the origin of the universe, I still think the question of the origin and evolution of life and the existence of technological life would change humanity more than anything else, except for the fact that I don't think there's anyone else out there. So I'm going to take a contrarian point of you. Not a skeptic. I don't like the role of skeptic. I think that's kind of overblown and hyperbolic.

And people, you don't want to invite too many skeptics to, you know, to a fun birthday party. But I want to play to play the role of somebody who would like nothing better than for aliens, for UFOs, for UAPs to all be harbingers of unexplored civilizations that are going to be hopefully benevolent. And yet, I'm coming from a perspective of moderation of my excitement so that I don't get too overblown and too, optimistic. And I hope that we can have a very spirited discussion. And as I said, there's no one I'd rather have this friendly, bloodthirsty debate with than Professor Lee Cronin, who's a who's a giant in his field and has already accomplished a tremendous amount. And yet we differ. And hopefully by the end, we should have a rubric by which we can apprise for the audience how much we have learned from each other. If I changed my mind, if Lee changes his mind. So maybe after Lee's introduction, we'll have kind

a framing, you know, the rules of the fight, like Kurt, you'll be in the middle of the ring, and we'll go toe to toe to toe. With that, turn it over to my buddy Lee. Lee. Thanks, Brian. Is that okay? Were you, Kurt? Yes, please go. So, yeah, I mean, this is, I was really looking forward to this because Brian and I both share the rule of scientific law that we kind of like data and we like experiments and we like theory. And I've listened to Brian debate a lot. And he's very he's much more polite and patient than I am. So I have a lot of respects. I really have to read between the lines. And I've been involved in some debates where people just want to catch me out. And I know, Brian's been in the same place. So I would say today is probably almost going to be

too congenial. But I think that's really important because we're both open-minded, but we're optimistic about different things. Now, as a chemist, I have a very intuitive feel for the way chemistry works on planet Earth, the rate at which molecules are made and destroyed. And I'm fascinated by biology. And actually, I mean, I describe myself a full disclosure. I'm really an experimental theorist in a way. I'm not, I don't think I have the analytical brain to be a good theorist, but I'm really good at coming up with experiments to develop a theory. And I'll explain a little bit better, it seems a bit weird. But I do agree with Brian. I'm very skeptical about making declarations. I don't know if I can put a number on, and I was on the computer

on the back, alien life or not. I wrote a paper a few years ago, which is called quantifying the origins of life on a planetary scale. And I'll talk about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox and the chemistry. But let's let and I also want to make this about what Brian is doing very well is saying, hey. 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. I don't know. I won't paraphrase too much because I think he's much more qualified to give his own point of view, given his here. So there is this kind of gap in his intuition. And I'm going to try and fill that and say, well, look, I know how easy chemistry is. I know how odd life is. And I want to make a couple of statements. The first thing is we don't really know what life is.

And I don't mean in some kind of weird kind of whether we are, you know, projections from an astral plane. We're clearly material. I'm kind of a materialist, but to kind of cheat on one of a copy of what Penrose said in a podcast said, I'm a materialist, but I just don't know what the matter is, right? And I think that's kind of important to understand that. So that's one point. The other point is I would appeal to this out at the beginning, I would say there's lots of gaps in my kind of feeling of how the universe works. So physicists typically have, I think, not have three or four things that I find confusing that they conflate to kind of think that life is odd. The first of all is the origin of the universe.

How did the universe get started? You'll hear time and time again for the second law, that is that things get more disordered over time. have more order at the beginning. So say, hey, where does that order come from? And Brian is really well qualified to explain that. And I'm hoping that by him explaining some of the positions I find confusing, I'll be able to explain some of the positions he finds confusing. We might even find ourselves agreeing, which is not a very good blood sport. But let's not prejudge our agreement, because there's lots of disagreement. So physicists think that there needs to be an order at the beginning of the universe. So I find that confusing. And I, the second law for me is baked into the way

I do chemistry. So I get this chemistry, all these complex molecules, and they turn into life and hey, presto, we get there. Well, actually, it's not like that. We don't know what it is. The other gap is that we talk about this thing called entropy, and we also talk about what we call causation and kind of the emergence of information or intention. And so in my opening statement, and I would just like to say there were significant gaps in physics, which were precludes us from really even understanding why the universe is here. So I both sympathize with Brian's view, but I also would like to go, you know, straight back at you and say,

could we could understanding the origin of life, which I'm not so interested in, I want to understand how life forms as a phenomena, it might even actually help us understand what the universe is. And so my real, intuition is that life is as easy as start and a fusion reaction in the sky. And there are fusion reactions starting all the time, stars giving birth and stars dying. And we need to think statistically in that way to start to reframe the argument. Now, does all life term into intelligent life,

we can debate that and talk about it. But I would say that in my opening argument, I think I see no barrier for why life can't be common. There seems to be no law or no gotcha in terms of resource. But I do concede we don't know what life is, but I also would kind of say, you know, we don't really know where the second law comes from, that time seems to be optional in our universe. And we have all this jiggery-pokery with the second law and how things happen. And with that, I will close my opening statement. All right. Let's agree on some definitions or let's get them out of the way. So perhaps Lee, why don't you define, I know this is highly contentious, but why don't you define what life is?

And if you can't define it, then why can't you define it? And then also intelligence. So life and intelligence. And then Brian, add to that or tear it down. Yeah, please tear it down. So there's more definitions of life than there are life forms on earth thinking about it, which I'll give you some. But I'll give you the standard. But I'll give you the standard NASA definition, and I'll give you a slightly easier one, which will also blow your mind. So NASA kind of got a committee and got a lot of really smart people together and really, you know, said, well, okay, look, what are we kind of looking for? And I'm going to get this wrong because I don't know it by wrote, but it's roughly saying that life is a self-reproducing or

sustaining evolutionary chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. I think of almost got it in a line. And there's a lot of things in there because it's saying has to be self-sustaining. There's replication and there's Darwinian evolution. There's kind of a lot of terms. And the thing for that is you have to then get almost like the legislature out to say, you know, do you qualify to be a life form? You know, are you replicating? Okay, maybe. Are you metabolizing? And then you get people saying, oh, but fire. Fire kind of does that. Why is fire not alive? and you get all trapped into circles and people say, oh, viruses, are they alive? So I'm going to give you the kind of Cronin definition, but actually is probably more like

the Walker definition or the Cronin Walker definition. And I'm collaborating with a colleague in ASU, Sarah Walker, who really has inspired a lot of this. And we've been developing a theory, but I'll come to that later. What I'm going to say, and this is for the people listening, that living systems I don't know what they are exactly. They're kind of like a bit, although they're material,

there's some weird stuff. But what do living systems uniquely do? There no other systems do. They create complex objects, okay, in abundance that couldn't form randomly. So be it, this 3D printer, Tesserac, which I made on my 3D printer, this nice Phoenix solar watch,

which are little lights coming on at the back, so it's all function. And my mouse, my body and the complex objects that they just couldn't randomly form. Now we can just find complexity in a minute, but I'm going to give you kind of one other thing. This thing, or kind of says that this is alive and it kind of is, we shall blow your mind. This is alive. Or this is evidence of life. And then people say, ah, a virus is alive. And the answer is yes. viruses are produced by evolutionary systems with biology and that viruses could not exist

without the chain of events which connects all of us right back to that origin of life on earth. So I guess I'm saying NASA definition for some of the efficinados, you know, replication, metabolism, Darwinian evolution. But I would say, okay, that's really hard. Tickbox, tick box. why not look for things that do complex things that we wouldn't expect. And so that's life to one degree. Then intelligence kind of builds on that because clearly this was not evolved in the desert. This required human beings to invent, you know, lithography, a cheering machine, electricity. I mean, I am so proud of humanity.

It might say I'm a bit like a bit kind of, you know, weird, but how much creativity went into making this silly little watch. There's a solar cell in here. There are LEDs. There's a microprocessor. There's lithographic defined memory. And there's refined titanium. I was feeling rich when I bought this.

I wanted a light watch on my list. There's all this cool stuff that we've done. And this clearly is evidence. And I'm going to use this term. And I don't like using it. But I'm going to use it in the way that I mean it. And I'm sure Brian and you will cut me down if you think I'm being ambiguous. This is a result of intelligent.

design. And what I mean, a human being building abstractions in their head, were able to leap beyond the confines of evolution, able to think about stuff and conceptualize, not having to die trying it out, and they made the watch. So all the way back, definition of life, evolution, chemistry, NASA, my definition, stuff, things that make complex things you couldn't, in abundance, with lots of copy numbers that you wouldn't find ordinarily, say on the moon, on the Mars. And intelligent life can make objects that are even more intricate. So you have three epochs. You have the random epoch, just laws of physics doing their cool stuff.

The biological epoch, the distribution of objects in that narrows a bit, and then technology and intelligence produces a delta function. The number of transistors in here that have no variation, that almost perfect, is staggering. That's kind of long-winded, but I think I just wanted to get that out, because it's quite precise, and we'll get people watching and listening to think really like, oh my gosh, this cup is evidence of billion years of life. Because of no potter, no discovery of no clay, no cup.

Just imagine how many, this lineage, this trajectory, this object. This is actually made in Beijing. There's some lovely pictures on here. this is evidence of billions of years of progress. I'll stop there. Brian, what are your comments on that? Well, you know, of course, with a definition as maybe one could say flexible as all that could, you know, be said to entail, of course, there's, it's hard to disagree. I was preferring to think about things, you know, there was a decision you both are not of the United States in origin, But there was a famous Supreme Court case in the 50s, I think, where the court was asked to describe what is pornographic.

And the upshot was that you know it when you see it. And I think, you know, we can kind of, you know, debate about things that we know for sure aren't alive. And we can debate about things that we could all say are alive. And I think leads onto something that there may be a deep and maybe unassailable interplay between the notion of the kind of. being that's defining life and the order and structure by which he or she ascribes that feature to be indicative of a biological process. Normally what I hear is, well, life, it depends. And even what is consciousness? It depends. And as you know, Kirk, there are people that believe, you know, the quarks in the cup that Lee was holding up are a lot or have consciousness in a pan-psychist format. I don't know

if Lee believes that or not, but I would suspect not. Yeah, he's shaking. his head. So what I think is important is that we all sort of can recognize the boundary cases as not or yes, certainly affirming to be of life. And it's kind of like, you know, these debates about, you know, like think about abortion. Abortion is really controversial here in America. Nobody would say before your parents met each other, that you were an organism, you were a baby. And nobody would say after, you know, 10 months out of the womb that you're not a living being. So it's in the, it's in they superposition the Schrodinger state where it can be, is it alive? That's where the ambiguity comes in. And the human brain, as Lee knows, and you know too, Kurt, hates ambiguity. We force

patterns on top of things. The ambiguity bias is a well-known psychological affair. So the question is not are the edge cases alive, but are the, you know, how do we, how do we parse and split with granularity that's sufficient to provide the satisfaction morally and intellectually that we're actually making progress. So I like that Lee began, originally he mentioned the Drake equation, and we should actually go through that and what that entails. Because I think in that realm, my field, not me specifically, I don't study the origin of life or technology, etc., it has brought the most to bear the field of astrophysics. Again, not what I do, but many terms in the Drake equation have been reduced in their uncertainty has come from astrophysics, not from chemistry,

not from biology, et cetera, you know, from discoveries that have been made by my colleagues, not by me again. So I think what's important is that we all can first agree on the baseline definitions on the pitch, which is that, you know, living things, we have some vague notion of what living things are. And I think the only thing I was a little discouraged in what Lee said originally was he doesn't want to talk about the origin of life. And I feel like all the these things are kind of interrelated. There are classic chicken or egg type problems, you know, and I think life chemistry, et cetera, has a great deal to say. And I'm doubly surprised because in Lee's phenomenal TED Talk from 2011, September 9th, 2011, my 40th birthday, he goes on and

tells Chris Anderson in front of a live audience that within two years, he's going to be able to make life in his laboratory. And I don't think necessarily that you would claim that to be a successful bet at this point, Lee, but I'd love to know what is, and I'm not criticizing you, merely bringing up the fact that there is a tendency, mostly in my field, to have things like the God equation, the God particle, the mind of God and the God equation, all these things, the hype that we have in the field of cosmology, Kurt, is unparalleled. And I worry that if we don't avoid that in kind of the essence of describing the origin of life, evolution of life, aliens, UFOs, all the things we're going to talk about today. I hope we will,

because it's so fascinating and has driven me since I was a kid. Nevertheless, there is a tendency and a propensity for us to believe what we want to believe and maybe put things in the file drawer that we find discrepan. And so I would just say, I think it is important that we talk about the origin of life. I think that's a crucial question. And I think there's no one better on Earth to talk to than Lee. I'm sure there are many better people to talk to. Let us unpack it, the unpack it. So yeah, the TED Talk, I really enjoyed doing the TED Talk. I was the first up at the TED Global that year, the first up, and they start with origins. I actually meant what I meant, and what I said in full, it sounds like a cop-out politician, you know, you know, Boris Johnson's

like I didn't know it was a party. So what I was trying to make is two important points. The number one is that I think the origin of life is fast. And once I've worked out how to set up the engine, I'm building a evolutionary engine, it will take a couple of years. I stand by that, and it has been two years. It's been 10 years. But in the 10 years, I've had to design a programming language for chemistry in lab and find the money. And when I went to get money from people and I said, hey, guys, do you want to invest in the origin of life? Their eyes glaze over.

And they said, okay, do you want to invest in drug discovery? They went, oh, yeah, good. So what I've been doing over the years is actually building this technology. They're now existing the lab. And I'm super excited. Now, I made a major error, many major errors. I mean, I completely concede. I wasn't overhyping, saying to you can watch a video.

I was generally like, I wasn't expected that question. I was like, I don't know. Two years, why not? That's cool. Let's go. But there's a really important point. At that point, I had an intuition about what to look for. But I didn't really have an experiment.

Okay. I didn't have a theory. I didn't have a model. And I didn't have a threshold. And I was like, can I swear on air? I was like, yeah, what do you mean by threshold? You didn't have a threshold. I'll come to that in a second.

So I was like, holy shit, I have nothing, right? And then you think, then I looked at CERN and how they did it. So NASA couldn't find the origin of life. Sorry, alien at the life dependent on it because they're like, oh, is it green? Is it a microtube? Is it phosphine? Is it actually, to be fair, NASA didn't say anything about phosphine. We'll come to that.

But inspired by the machine that was the, was the, LHC, they have one of the best press officers ever, they had the standard model. It's a beautiful model. They had a theory, sorry, which gave rise to the standard model. They were able to simulate the standard model, work out what energy range in which to find the Higgs. So then had an experiment, build a collider, go to 138.5G. You have a better memory for this as I do, but there, find a peak, get it 11 Sigma,

Higgs, job done, you've got it. So what I was going to say is to reassure Brian or to make him decide, we're not just going for the origin of life. We're going for the phenomena that produces life in general. Think of it like when you look up in the sky. Let's just imagine that it's a few hundred thousand years from now and humans had emerged slightly later. And they look up in the sky and all they see is the sun.

they don't see any other stars. What they would in, they'd be obsessing about the origin of the sun. How did it come? There's fusion. Where were those hydrogen atoms? Those damn hydrogen atoms. How did it happen? And then fusion came.

But now we look up and say, there's a sun. That's cool. And they go over there. There's a sun. Look, one's just died. One's started. One's died. So what I'm trying to say is, of course, I'm studying the origin of life.

But I'm not just studying the origin of life. I'm understanding the emergence of life in general so I can do statistics. And all I can do in my lab, is build the experiment. So now I'm like, okay, I need to build a life generator. So I need to build a simulator of planet Earth, have a load of pots, load of warm ponds, programming language, pumps and valves, doing all the chemistry for, you know, but I don't have a planet or 200 million years.

I have some grad students, brilliant grad students, 25 of them, and four years. So then I'm multiplexing it. So I've got a kind of theory, which is unreasonable, complex. That's my theory. My model is to go and then generate networks of molecules that will produce that unreasonable complexity. I then have a threshold, which I can talk about, which is I published a paper last year, an alien meter that kind of works for life. And I now should go run it. And I mean, I've done this as timestamp. It's 2022. We're getting old all the time. but I will let you know, I will tweet when the experiment is ready to start,

and I'm going to connect my complexity to Twitter. And it's just going to talk right there. The chemistry that comes out, it just be random. And what you need to do is look at that Twitter account. And when it starts writing or when you see patterns in the tweets, you'll know a life form has emerged in Glasgow. So yes, we are doing Origin of Life, but I want to frame it more broadly.

And I also think that I would like to come. kind of just suggest that, you know, it is quick. So the two years I promised that the TED Talk is correct. And as Brian knows from doing big experiments, political and all sorts of things, which two years are the most important? That's right. They always say, you know, X experiment, or X discovery is 10 years from now, and it will always be so. But, Lee, let me, you know, I love you and I'm going to keep harping on that fact. So nature's under no obligation to, you know, fulfill things on our grant schedules, on our, on our, you know, biological clocks, which is a kosher form of clock as far as I'm concerned. But, but I want to take you back to 1854 when a fellow

Scotsman, a brilliant lad, just like yourself, sir, and he was working away. And he discovered these four laws that are eponymously named at the Maxwell equations. And James Clerk was working away, and he discovered that, and he said, these imply and impute the laws of electromagnetic radiation. and how can they propagate through the seeming void that separates us from the sun from all these objects that Lee's already described? Well, it must be the luminiferous ether, the vitreous, the virtuous electromagnetic ether. And he said, well, how does that work? And he went through it. And he had this system of vortices, gears, pulleys, and ropes and so forth on a microscopic level, which is totally laughable. So now imagine Lee, if Twitter existed back then, or how about if Twitter existed

when Darwin wrote his letter to, was it Huxley? He'll correct me about the warm little pond. And he said, oh, it's an if and it's a very big if. And what if, you know, there was a Twitter in a bot connected to Darwin's warm little pond in 1840s, 1850s? Or what if Miller Yuri? By the way, Yuri was Stanley was Lee, Yuri, who was Harold Uri, rather, who was at UC San Diego, a mile from my office here. And our chemistry department is named Yuri Hall.

And he worked with his grad student, Stanley Miller. And they came up with this famous Miller-Yuri experiment, which sounds an awful lot, except for the existence of a computing machine next to it, in 1951. And you could have turned it on and maybe connected it to a touring machine that could then tweet. And that would then, you know, here we are. Here's the, here's the prototype of life coming out. And it's now it's doing something complex, organized, reducing of entropy, collecting information and providing surprise. I think that's important. And it'd be totally far off from the way we actually.

believe and correct me if I'm wrongly, but I'm going to be bold because Kurt's paying us, you know, handsomely to be aggressive. And I'm going to say, I don't think we've made any progress in this type of field of Miller, Yuri, Darwinian, warm little pools since, you know, since those original conjectures. I think they've been shown to be wrong, not, you know, scientific fraud, but there's no evidence that those chemicals, even if they could be provided and sterilized little beakers that I get at my chemistry stockroom and you get in your chemistry stockroom with pipettes that are cleaned and connected to an autoclave, that even so they can reproduce actual living organisms. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm ready for the arrows.

No, I mean, look, so I'm, I don't want to, so I'm stuck here. I'm as a chemist. I mean, chemists have made an incredible achievement since the time of Miller-Yeary, right? I think the problem is the let me yeah so the the experiments the milliuria did was a bit like um you doing the bicep one project in 1950 and the technology wasn't there you kind of we kind of understood polarization we understand about light we didn't know anything about the microwave background so they were they were kind of they were kind of visionary and that they had a hint that life existed oh sure whereas you know the physicists were like there's no you know there's no big bang there's just this steady state model and all this stuff. So they were kind of headed a physicist at that time.

And so what they did, they were a victim at their own naivety of simplification. And so, and so the progress that was made there is they just said, okay, we'll just take some very basic molecules and put them in a flask and heat them. So the middle of your experiment is literally a big bell jar with a cycle circuit where you got a heater and you have some water, methane, hydrogen, ammonia. Okay. And these are the elements you need for most amino acids, which will have carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen. Some have sulfur in it, but let's leave those out here. They didn't put any sulfur in. And so what they showed was something that I love mathematics. I'm a much better kind of

a computer scientist than mathematician than I am a kind of historical chemist. So for me, when someone says, oh, here's some glycine. Glycine is the simplest amino acid. Conventory, it's easy to get. It's like maybe flicking three or four heads in a row with a coin flip. Okay. So, and, and they did this with a lot of amino acids. And so the chemists kind of, they made this and it was still remarkable because they said, whoa, these simple things can make amino acids. Amino acids are in proteins. Is there a link? Well, of course there's a link in so far as the atoms in that jar can find their way into amino acids. But we know that life isn't about amino acids. Life is something different, right? And so I don't think they've failed. I think the

chemists have been asked to develop a philosophy or to develop an ontology that just didn't exist. And I think that that, so I, you know, and I think that chemists are doing brilliant things. Now, what's happened in the 50 years? Well, chemists have gone on and cured disease and made interesting molecules. And we all know that. I'm not here to defend them. But the analysis has got better. But Lee, aren't you guys still now with things like the RNA world, which we have to discuss?

I mean, isn't it just redux this, this, you know, redux reaction now at what was the Miller-Yuri amino acid now, oh, now we know the secret is RNA. So I would say within every field, so I'm going to try and do this as delicately as possible, within every field, you have a field that gets stuck and they are, and the origin of life chemists are really interested in commentary, the easiest route to X, Y, and Z. And then they see a series of smoking guns. And the thing is, I'm sure that Brian and I readily agree that RNA is not. the answer to the origin of life. But I think I have an understanding of the underlying

theoretical framework. And that's what I'm going to push Brian on in just one moment. So life has little to do with the actual specific molecules. It's a bit like saying, I can only make a motor car that's, you know, I don't know, let's take a BMW. I discover a BMW or that I discover a Tesla, right? You know, let's say there's the origin of automobiles on planet out there. And it's, you know, there's no space for Tesla, it's just BMW, or there's no space for a BMW is just Tesla. There's only one way of doing it. Or Kurtz Lamborghini. My son is into Ferrari.

It's like, that is like Ferrari all the way. He's getting a midlife crisis at age 10. There's not one way of solving that chemical problem. And what I'm here to reassure Brian on is like, whoa, chemistry is special. Like, it's not. The problem that chemists have is that they are playing around in the mess. in their middle. So here, let me just frame the whole discipline. My ambition in my lifetime is not only to get to solve the origin of life and make artificial life and find aliens, those three things are

needed, I think, together, because not one of them is going to be acceptable, I think. And also, as the alien discussion is going in our popular culture right now, and this is something that Sarah Walker has pointed out to me many times. It's really interesting that people are excited about aliens. And I kind of disagree with Brian a little bit. He says, oh, if people just find an alien life form, they won't care. They will, but it needs to be framed properly because people want to know. They want meaning. So going back to this origin of life and why is it wrong? Well, physicists deal with low memory systems, right? That's why I would call them low memory systems. Physicists themselves are very high memory individuals, right? They have to be

good at mathematics and modeling and so on. Low memory systems. That means that a few equations can broadly show you how things work. Not precisely. Then you go into chemistry, and chemistry is a bit messier. There's lots more compounds in Maine, more common to our explosion. But again, chemists, alchemists, whatever, we can make new materials, molecules, and so on. Then you get to biology, and that's a medium memory. When you get to biology, you have all this contingency and evolution,

Cambrian explosion, there are legs popping up everywhere, eyes everywhere, things calm down. You get to where we are on Earth with dinosaurs. The chance of that comes. A dinosaur goes extinct. Mammals run around and suddenly we have human beings building iPhones and YouTube and whatever. And I think that the memory in those increases like dramatically. We can't even conceive because physics has not, and we say it's all physics fault, right? I'm not in defense of the chemist. Physics doesn't understand entropy. It's wrong.

The definition of entropy is wrong. Sadly, this is really huge, Kurt. So Lee has a very provocative, unorthodox, and not necessarily accepted within physics. It doesn't mean he's wrong, but I think we should put a pin in that and definitely want to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Your audience needs to hear his perspective, and they hopefully will want to hear my rebuttal too. But, but Lee, I don't want to interrupt you. Is this related to assembly theory or is it different? Yeah, yeah, it's about a same thing. I'm unsure how a definition can be wrong. What do you mean by the definition of entropy is wrong? The entropy is trying to capture something and the definition doesn't capture that.

Let's define entropy for a second. And so it's not the definition isn't wrong. It's what we need to, the whole concept is wrong. It's highly, it's like these are career ending words, right? There would be all the thermodynamics out there canceling me. But because thermodynamics are pretty cool guys and they're like the stats, they're not going to cancel me. They might take pity on me and teach me some.

statistical mechanics. So what do I mean? So if you, what is entropy first? Entropy varies loosely as a measure of disorder. So and and what we say in general, I take a process to be sorry? I don't think that's the case. Do you think that's the case, Brian, that it's a measure of disorder? No, it is. Yeah. I know that's colloquially what it is. No, no. If you, the entry, so if you want to calculate the entropy of something, you look at the state, you look at the actual state versus the microstate versus the number. possible states, look at the fraction of those. And basically, when you look at the entropy, the value, it tells you how much disorder you have. The lower the number, the lower the disorder,

the more order. The higher the number, the higher the disorder. The higher the number of arrangements. That is the precise definition of entropy. It goes from the molecular level, the atomic level, all the way up to the macro level. Well, Kurt, I should say that John von Neumann said, nobody understands entropy. So if you ever discover something, call it entropy. There's like what, Lee, eight different Shannon entropy, Van Neumann. No, but that's, but we'll, I know how you're using it. I don't fundamentally disagree, Kurt. I don't disagree with that. The tricky part, Lee, and I'd like some clarification is that when people use the word order, we have a certain meaning in our everyday life, in our vernacular. But then when we use the word entropy, it has a specific meaning that isn't necessarily tied to order, though it's correlated with it. And you can see this with a copy. No, no, no. We have to, let's go back, because Brian will back me up here. The entropy that's used in information theory is not correct, right? It is a, it is a colloquialism. It is not. anchored in physical reality. What is anchored in physical reality is the basic idea,

the idea of a heat engine, okay? So I want to talk about the heat engine. So basically what the thermodynamics is realized, if you want to get maximum efficiency out of your heat engine, you maximize the temperature difference between the two parts, right? And then you can extract. Sorry? That's a carnal efficiency, right? Exactly. And so, and Brian is agreeing to me because it's right. It's how it works right there. Now, Boltzman came along, and he realized that you could derive the existence of molecules of atoms from this approach. It's like ab initio. It was amazing, right? So you could infer that these molecules are moving around and they have these energies associated with them and they could be added up and they would give you

what you measure, right, by experiments. Now, that's out there. What I'm saying here is human beings create the boundary conditions of the engine. We build the engine. We do work. We interact on the, on the boundary conditions to make things happen. And then we label the beginning and the end. And the way we label things, we label things in such a way as an observer that we kind of stack the deck. So we always see the entropy change. So let's pause there because that's quite a deep thing. We have to dig down and Brian will attack it in a good way because it needs clarification. Now let's go to information and entropy. This is where things get confusing. Shannon wanted to qualify the amount of noise in a channel if we're speaking, right? And he wanted to think about the

number of possible states. How surprising is it if I get this bit, do I get that bit, right? And what Shannon was able to do is come up with a very nice mathematical formalism. They look very similar to entropy, okay, on a channel. But people misunderstood and said that everything is a communication channel. But no, Shannon says there has to be an encoder and a decoder. and then Shannon information can be used only under those circumstances. No encoder, no decoder, no Shannon information. Okay? That's what I mean.

So I really wanted to take that very carefully and define those to the best of my ability. And I'm very happy for Brian to correct anything because he's a better teacher than I am. And I think on this, we broadly agree what the definition of is. I think just for Kurt and for the audience, who's incredibly erudite second only to the end of the impossible podcast audience in terms of erudition, brilliance, and alacrity of brain power. No, I'm just kidding. There's a podcast that Brian hosts for those who are watching called Into the Impossible, and I recommend you check that out.

I'll leave a link in the description. And Kurt is my, he is my thesis advisor and all things in YouTube. He has really helped me tremendously, and I have gratitude for him. So Lee is eminently correct here. I think this is absolutely something that we can orient towards. And that only highlights, again, this very delightful and delicious. You have to understand, Kurt. Me and Lee share one thing in common.

The curiosity depends on us being mystified, stymied, and perhaps even deceived by nature at certain times. Our job is to not deceive ourselves or other people to get money, attention, fame, et cetera. But in these contexts, when you have ambiguity, again, Lee mentioned a lot of topics in that definition, which is eminently correct, insofar as we all agree on things like temperature, we agree on basics like the microstate, what constitutes microstates, distributions, and fundamentally, if we agree on time. And Lee has some very, very, again, delightful, delicious, you know, possibly delusional, but wonderful ideas about time and its fundamentality. But let's connect.

Let's keep going back to what Lee said, which I think is brilliant and controversial. He said, physicists do not understand entropy, which implies, concomitantly with that, I think Lee, you'll agree that we don't understand time. Because time and temperature, I think you could say we might understand, but that's intimately connected to molecules, right? You don't have temperature of a single quark, right? That's not substantive to talk about. So chemistry comes in, and I think I would disagree that, you know, chemists have a superior

understanding. I think they have insight that physicists do not appreciate, and Lee's 100% correct. We don't appreciate this molecular story. And I'll just correct. One thing that Lee said, I don't think Boltzman, you know, fundamentally, you know, prove the existence of molecules. I think that was Einstein, later with Brownian motion, which was concomitant with Boltzman and Maxwell's earlier statistical mechanics. But let's just take this back to Lee's controversial statement, which is that to understand time and to understand entropy, we really

need to understand chemistry because they're all fundamentally pivoting on a very singular hinge, which is a chemical definition or a practical working definition of entropy, which Lee posits comes from chemistry exclusively correctly. Yeah, and I think to, I mean, so going back to Boltzmann and the proof of atoms, Boltzmann proved, I mean, you can add it on what Einstein did, that basically, that molecules are little microstates, basically, and that microwave. So that's a good correction. We must get these corrections, right.

So going on with entropy, so what I was saying to you, Kurt, is that when you look at a process, you say, oh, this whole process has occurred, the entropy of the universe has increased, right? It's like some kind of law. And I keep saying to people, what is the basis for that law? And this is really tricky. So we get to a circular argument. People say, well, of course, if we do the statistics, what we do is we count everything up in there and put them in how much energy you have, how many of you, you know.

And then we then sum it up and we look at the entropy. We calculate their number. And then we look at the change. So we look at after, before and after. And we look at the difference there. Now the problem is with respect to what are we labeling? And so what I'm saying is that entropy as a term is useful if you're a God looking down on your universe and you see the system and you see the surroundings.

If you're doing that, you're good. I'm not saying that everyone using entropy is insane. I'm saying entropy relies on coarse graining. And coarse graining removes causation. So this is the problem because entropy basically says, Everyone says, there's no causation in the universe we don't need it. There's a second law. And I'm saying, no, there is no second law.

The second law does not need to exist if you allow causation to exist. And then, and it removes the number of uncertainties. And my universe requires no second law, no order at the beginning. It only requires causation and the physical laws we already know. And that is critical. Let me just, you know, because Lee is a, delightful ability. I wonder if he is part, part member of the, of the tribal families, because he talks with his hands and, and he's just so brilliant in his, uh, in his single-mindedness of

discourse, but I have to put a positive. So Lee is also pushing back on something. That's very controversial. And he has tremendous Kurt. Again, Kurt, I know you wanted to have blood on the floor of the mat by round five. I think we're probably in round three. It's going to get there. We're going to get bloody. But one bloody good thing that Lee has said exclusively courageously, I think only on my podcast interview with him, was that chemistry has, quote, an intelligent design problem. So what, and Lee takes on these intelligent designers, which I've had on my show, and I don't mind, and Lee's debated them, and it's kosher in my mind to talk to such people, Stephen C. Meyer, James Tour, or others. But fundamentally, he has courage, Lee has courage in that he is admitting

there is a lack, a lacuna, in our understanding of science, which we are comfortable with because we are making progress towards an understanding that hopefully would not involve God. But hopefully, if it does involve God, chemist, physicists around the world could be open-minded enough to accept and change their priors based on that. Now, what he said is fundamentally important two minutes ago. He said he doesn't require a second law. Now, why is the second law so problematic for chemists who reject the intelligent design hypothesis, which obviously Lee does? And that is a second law. is that because without some low-ordered state, which can get into my field of cosmology, how did inflation, had the Big Bang unfurl if there was no pre-existing universe, a pre-existing

state perhaps, how do you establish a low entropy state of the universe for it to grow to today's facetity of information, of complexity, of chaos, of entropy by 10 to the, what, 100 orders of magnitude that Penrose has pointed out in the 80s already? This is a huge challenge to cosmology. How do you get to high entropy today if you didn't start with low entropy in the beginning. People like David Albert and others have postulate something called the past hypothesis, which is basically by Fiat some entity instantiates as zero entropy or low entropy state. I don't, I think that's kind of touching on almost intelligent design-like features. But Lee's self-consistent, if not correct, I'm saying he is self-consistent. If he can avoid the second law's validity uniformly,

universally, then he precludes and excludes a need for some designer. And I just wonder, Lee, is that driven by some desire to eliminate a godhead, or is this fundamentally just an element of a self-consistent theory of the early universe that leads to the chemistry, time, facundity that we just described? I mean, I was thinking about this today, actually, because I was listening to something you were saying. And, no, I've always really had an intuition for time that was different to everyone else's. And I remember my physics teaching when I was at high school, who used to work at CERN.

and I was just saying this thing called time. And she said, no, you don't understand time is nothing. It's just the ability to watch interactive things to happen. It is if you have to distribute energy, you have time. And I was just like, let's just, and for all these years, I've just, for me, it just felt wrong. And I kind of ignored it. And when I came back in, and I'm a very open-minded chemist in that, for me, chemistry is a way of interacting in the universe to ask questions. And when I look around and I can see that you have sand on a beach that is inorganic

made of silicates, there might be biological stuff in there, but you've got inorganic stuff. And then you can see a blade of grass where there's a molecular machine in there that's assembling, taking light, taking CO2 and respiring. You can't help thinking there must be some incredible force of nature that we're misunderstanding. Now, I don't mean like a force of gravity, but I will introduce, and this is what assembly theory quantifies, that physicists should give us a bit of causation. The physicists have taken causation out of everything in physics. So they have to magically invoke it, which is kind of why we have this free will problem now,

because we've got really smart people saying, I don't have free will because I live in a deterministic universe. And then you're just like, well, what are we doing this then? I might as well just run around naked on the YouTube channel because it's already pre-designed. And nobody acts like they have no free will. I mean, that's the thing. It's like if you meet somebody who truly believes that they have no free will and acts upon it, that person should be referred to. I think it doesn't Sam Harris claim, but anyway, I'm digressing a bit.

So what I mean is that you have this thing that for me, the missing force, if you like, or the missing phenomena that we are all missing by removing it, by having entropy, cheat number one, having order at the beginning of the universe, cheat number two, and having emergent time and emergent causation, cheat three and four, is that we're ignoring the fact that when you've got a universe just full of objects, let's call them just atoms, right, and some energy, and you start to break symmetry, that that symmetry can select. And there's this thing called selection. And you don't need biology for selection. You don't need, I don't worry, there's no panpsychism here. There is just the environment can

start to be the shepherd for the sheep, if you like, and then the sheep can become the shepherd. And they switch between the two, and you get complex behavior frozen in. Now, this is the point that random events are random, but they are absolutely monumental in the trajectory. So what I mean is you go to a billiard table and you just start moving the balls around, the state that you'll have a number of bounces later will be precisely controlled by your initial conditions and some variations. Start with different initial conditions, put in different energy, you'll get to a different place. Now, imagine that the system is able to record that memory of what happened before, that basically physics turns into chemistry through bond formation and complex

commentary explosion. And then that process is then harnessed when biology is invented by matter. And you're able to remember what happened to you at higher, high dimensionality. And that is what that causation from quarks to quacks, right? We can have a quote on that. I call it from rocks to rock mononoff. Yeah, that's a much better, you're much better at this than I am, Brian. But you go from this

kind of non-causal system to a causal system that then act on itself. So there's two levels. You get to biology and you get causation trapped in evolution. But then when evolution produces objects that can act on themselves, we can genetically engineer ourselves, we can play with the climate, we can play with the soil, we can play with technology. You get this explosion of further complexity. And that's how it works. And I think that the universe, is literally teeming with these engines of causation. And it doesn't need to be, and we can come to a Drake occasion and golly like Earth.

You know, the fact is there's life everywhere. The sad thing is we probably won't be able to recognize it other than if we use assembly theory. But that's obviously my bias, right? And the problem I have as a theorist here is I invented a theory in civil experiments. And what my challenge is to disprove my own theory with and the problem with the discipline I'm in

is the chemists won't even engage with it to start with and it's taking them a very long time. I have a different, I'm sorry, Kurt, to interrupt. Go ahead. It's better if I don't say anything. It means it's going well. Okay. Although I do have a quick question.

Yeah. It's for Lee and for you, Brian. What's a definition of order that doesn't involve entropy? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliance. like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host and style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice.

Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store online for details. Because if you're saying low entropy is order, well, then that sounds like a definition of order. yet the word order was used prior to the word entropy being invented. So this is really tough. So you've asked a really smart.

So I'll take a stab at it and Brian will as well. You can define information in terms of your certainty about what's going to happen. So if I take a coin, right, and I say I'm going to flip my coin and I have no idea, I have no prior, I have nothing to suggest that it's a weighted coin. I will assign a prior that I'm going to give, you know, 50% head or sales and I'll collect data and I'll update. So that update constitutes some information. And that is the same type of thing you want to have a look at in order.

Order is a really odd thing. Because order is about registry. And so I would say that order happens when you have no constraints. So let's say, and you allow things to cool down. So let's just take a phase transition. You take some water vapor and you allow that water vapor to kind of precipitate and grow an ice crystal. Okay, and if you allow that to happen very slowly, the order will arise from the fact the molecules in that ice crystal, the water molecules, will take the correct low energy

configuration to bake a nice tetrahedral symmetry, and then you'll get no defects in there and you'll produce this perfect object that just happens because the laws of physics give you that. So order arises when you have no, the constraints are minimal. that's kind of a really nice definition of order. And it's hard because lots of people argue and they bring in, it's all anthropomorphic, you know, my kid's bedroom is not ordered. You will claim it is, right?

But, you know, so that's, and then you then frame it in these entropic and information arguments. But you say, hey, what is information? Information is about uncertainty. What is entropy? Entropy is about disorder. So the one way I'm looking at is causation. or information for me is almost the inverse of entropy. So when I burn something, I know how much entropy has changed. So if I burn a book, I in principle, or I take a book to the event her at a black hole,

right, you're going to get all the information back out as hawking radiation. I won't be, I count it, but I should be able to work out what it's roughly going to be. So it tells me what I've lost. It's never told me what I have. And that's why I'm pushing so hard on this, is entropy is almost like the inverse. It tells me that I lost stuff. It can never tell me what I had. Yeah, I would very much agree with that. I would only add on just another example. Think of a pendulum clock, a grandfather clock with the pendulum swinging back and forth in vacuum. You can use that to tell time. And actually, I think it's the minimal clock. Lee works a lot of minimal systems and systems that exhibit, you know, features of the very most simple basics and essence of the phenomenon, not simple in terms of

like dumb, but simple in terms of elementary and important. So you can have this clock swing back and forth, and you can use it to tell time, i.e. describe order, but if and only if you define the direction of the arrow of time, right? Because a pendulum is time translation symmetric. If I didn't tell you where it started, I swung the plum bomb out over here and let it go, you wouldn't know the absolute origin of time, but you could still count time in a parametric relative way. You could say so many cycles of the pendulum later, and you could say that's in the forward. But, But if the universe were, you know, arranged differently, the laws of physics work for Newtonian physics in the absence of heat and so forth, work the other way. So, yes, so Lee's right.

You imply some constraint. And then you can do stuff without imposing this interplay between entropy, time, and order, but only if you supply at least a minimum bit of information, i.e., what was the initial condition. But to get back to Lee's point, I think this will go back to our rubric that we established in the ground rules. you know, and Lee and I were nose to nose at the beginning, and Kurt was like pushing us, and we were like, you know, at the very beginning of the fight, you know, we should have some explanation of what our priors are and how we could change our minds. So one thing that Lee has said just now, and it said to me on my podcast, Anne has said in many of his wonderful debates, and again, I give him credit for his courage, this is so rare that you have a public-facing

scientist at the highest level, Regius professor at the UK, which is like, appointed by the queen. So I think he has to like taste test all our food to make sure she doesn't die. Like Martin Reese, he tells the queen her horoscope as the royal astronomer. Lee is like that level in his profession. So let me say that again, prefacing with respect. Lee is basically claimed that life is abundant. And so to me, in the universe.

And he's gone so far as to make a life detection machine, which after his Twitter bot, you know, in the warm Darwinian pool registers, you know, I'm setting up. my Twitter, like Jack did, you know, 20 years ago, after that, he's going to also, you know, provide the signal coming in from the universe autonomously generated based on fundamental mathematical principles connected to computational devices, turning machines. But that is predicated on this bias. I call you out. I use the B word, Lee.

You are biased that there is a life is plentiful throughout the universe. And I have to say, you know, with the Drake equation, which we can write down and I give it to my undergraduate students and Lee knows it backwards and forwards. The most important thing in any equation, Lee, correct me if I'm wrong, is not that you get the answer. It's how you account for your uncertainties, your statistical uncertainties, which are easy to calculate, and your systematic uncertainties, which are very, very difficult. I use this example in a talk I gave in the belly of the beast, guys, I went to the SETI Institute, which we can talk about later. I gave a talk and said, what if you apply the Drake equation to the San Diego Zoo, where I am? And you said, how many people

in the San Diego Zoo right now. And I go through the calculation. I come out with a number and it's like $8,000. And that's great, except when I do the error bars, if I account for each one of the terms that goes into the Drake equation for the San Diego Zoo and feel free to estimate, it's example of a Fermi type problem. If you don't include the error bars, it's meaningless. It's worthless.

So I believe that Lee should say that there's 100%, you know, that life is abundant, but I want to know his error bars. And I want to know how can he go about reducing those error bars. In other words, disproving himself, rather than confirming that life is abundant necessarily, what are the potential pitfalls, traps, biases, confirmation, and otherwise that this abundance detector that you have developed and promoted has any degree of credulity right now that there's 100%, as you said, there's 100% chance. I'm closer to 0% chance of life in the universe.

Again, no one would like to believe it more than me, especially intelligent aliens that could teach us the laws of physics of the 25th century right now so I can win that at Nobel Prize finally, but I want to know, Lee. I'm with you. Let me unpack this. Let me qualify because I think, I mean, we're violently agreeing. So my intuition, the way I understand how chemistry works is I think there's life everywhere.

I didn't quite say 100%. Brian is kind of. I have you on record saying 100%. I know, no, that's fine. It's fine. I'm happy to stand by. I think it's great. It's like you're really putting me there and, you know, going me in the corner and just

throwing the punches. And I would say that it is. I wouldn't say I'm biased. I'm optimistic. But if you were to say, Lee, how much evidence do you have for life else in the universe other than Earth? Zero.

I have zero evidence. But I would, you know, I could kind of say it, Brian, you know, hey Brian, let's set fire to something, right? Like, I don't know, some carbon. How much evidence do you have for carbon being on fire in oxygen in the universe? He'd probably wouldn't have any, right? But he knows it happens on Earth

and knows how simple it is And you could probably go, yeah, I could probably imagine some carbon being on fire somewhere. Kelvin used to think the sun was powered with coal, right? But when you did the math, you just worked out and having that energy. So totally, I have no evidence. There's life elsewhere in the universe. Zero. There's some hints there might have been life on Mars.

There's some hints that there might be some interesting stuff on Venus. We're excited about going to Europa and Celadus, right? So just to be clear for everyone listening, zero. I have zero evidence. Does that mean that I'm somehow life religious? No, no, no, no. What I'm saying is chemistry is so easy, so quick, and there are so many missing gaps. What is the likelihood here?

Is the likelihood that life is just vanishing it hard? Or is it that we don't actually know how we store information in chemical systems when evolution works? Because I do agree that there's probably life in the universe because we're using life is a very, I'm using life as a very broad, catch-all term for the following. I'm saying that when there is selection, there will eventually be some kind of evolution, and that evolution will normally give rise at some point in time to a Luca, and that Luca will go on. And Brian is absolutely right. There's lots of fragile links in that. And we just don't know. The point about the Drake equation,

however, is this. The Drake equation is not a law, is not really equation. It's a kind of made-up thing. You went, oh, look at this. Right. But I do think that Brian and I should sit down and say, okay, how many stars, how many planets, what fraction of the planets are even, you know, my motto here is let's allow any planet where bonds are allowed, covalent bonds, because covalent bonds, there's just, let's allow life on all, let's allow all of those to be lifeline. So then, you know, why I say, where there's bond, there's hope.

So you just look at me. And that's important because as Kurt always points out, you know, you want to have these no-go theorems, right, Kurt, this is something that's a fixture on your channel. You've been paying attention, Brian. Yeah, and I'm stipulating to you, Lee. I'm willing to change my mind that there is no no-go theorem. You know, so in other words, the probability is greater than zero, and I should never say zero, and I didn't say zero.

I said, I think it's closer to zero. But I agree with you. Bonds, the proclivity of bonds and the vicinity of carbon to make bonds and so forth, I would say there's lots of evidence of chemical reaction. I mean, we have examples of amino acids at high redshift that we can detect. and quasar absorption features. And we know chemistry takes place in distant objects. But, you know, this point is well taken.

Yeah, and I continue to push back and say, you know, I mean, my conviction is more out of my kind of my humbleness, really, because the Earth isn't that special. It's a rock in the solar system. We've got some carbon. We've got some oxygen. Yeah, people say, oh, it's lucky that we have a clean up, the Jupiter could clean up everything for us and all this. I don't know.

we don't know what time. Life emerged on Earth in 100 million years. It might be lucky for us that we have intelligent life. And I'm very happy to say, you know, I say to UFO believers all the time, the chances that an intelligent life form has sent a UFO to Earth is like, I mean, it's not zero, but there are other explanations, right? I mean, there's other things we can do. I mean, I know Eric Weinstein at the moment has gone a bit kind of UFO, you know, let's think about it, but I think he's doing it for not to be disruptive, well, to be disruptive, not disingenuous, and to get people, to take people's temperature. But coming back to this, I would say, I have seen no no-go theorems for, for know why life

shouldn't exist elsewhere, and given them, I'm an internal optimist, I'll say, well, look, there should be, it should be everywhere. But what I'm super excited about is I have a, I'm willing to make a wager. Brian is still young. I'm even younger. Not that much. But in the next decade or two, we'll, going to go to Enceladus in Europa and Titan. And I'm willing to bet that if we do find any

evidence of life on these objects, they will be totally different to life on Earth because I've had a completely different history. There is no relationship. Whereas we might find life on Mars. If we haven't put life on Mars by mistake, we might find evidence of primitive life on Mars that, going to Earth and ceded Earth, right? Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, but that puts things back. That's just changing the Earth. But let me... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, life on Earth and Lys on Mars are luckily to be coupled. That's not, that's nothing. If we go to Mars and we find Earth-like life, I'll be happy for a day

and I'll watch the Nobel Prize as will be given, but I'm like, that hasn't told me anything new. As a scientist, I want to discover something new. If I went to Enceladus, I found life form based on something that isn't RNA, that would be it for me. That would just be like the most amazing event in the universe. Why? Well, if I could find different life on Enceladus, I could start.

to frame the likelihood of alien life in our local group. I could think about how we could look at making new technologies based on living systems on Earth and really even more important. In fact, I almost have the same passion that Brian has for understanding the origin of the universe for this, is that if we can make life on Earth and understand the origin of life, we might be able to start to accept that life on Earth that we have right now in our ecosystem is very precious. And is a thing and we need to think about framing this living artifact, this cultural, you know, jewel that we need to keep to be as persistent for as long as possible and to create maximum flourishing for our little moral kind of work part in the universe. So I think almost

the way, if, you know, there are two films I watch. No, I'm talking about there's two films that came out the same year. One called Ad Astra, which was the most depressing, the Brian Keating movie. You know, you're just as good to look. King's Brad Pitt, you know, and all that. So, and there, you know, and there is another film called Cosmos, which was a low-budget UK movie, which I like. And you should watch them, because one basically, they're both about, should we find life? And one finds life, very optimistic, comes to Earth and says, we're here. And the other one is like miserable. There's no life anywhere. And for me, I think the difference between us is I'm an optimist because I understand my

chemistry and I'm a chemist. You're an optimist in your field. You understand that. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to borrow a bit of your intuition and I'm trying to lend you a bit of mind and see if we can change each other's mind from that point of view. But you're absolutely right. I have no evidence, but I have no reason why it can't happen. There is nothing magic about life on earth. Yeah. Well, I wonder if we could have a no-go theorem if you, if you would agree and then, you know, perhaps that would make our generous host, generous, good-looking and just with a delightful aroma, although I've never met him in person. Kurt's one of my best friends that I've never met in person.

I hope to rectify that in the very near future. You too, Lee. But you brought up Eric, you brought up. So I find that there is sort of a wish fulfillment aspect in many of these things, including in this huge and deservedly so excitement over JWST. I mean, I basically heard people portraying one of the science cases for JWST tantamount to, well, we're going to see like cities on exoplanet. You know, like, no, you're not.

you're going to see like spectral lines. And often Eric has talked about data and collecting data. And it's our data. The Hubble Space Telescope is our data. Like, well, it's data, but like take the Hubble Deep Field. I love mentioning this topic. So the Hubble Deep Field is data, but actually we don't use it, the data, the image, for anything. It's a screensaver, I call it the cosmic screensaver, cosmic wallpaper.

And that's all the image itself is, the data is within it. So if there's a UFO floating around in there, that is not the same as what astronomers call the type of evidence that we associate with data, stuff that we can be quantitative and analyze spectral time domain, multi-waterfall display. You know, we can do a ton of stuff with actual, with the photon information, not just the image information, the picture information. Now, mentioning this, there are, you know, concerns about what the implication would be. And so I'm curious to know why if life is so abundant, and then you sprinkle in some Darwinian evolution, why isn't, you know, a technological life abundant and why isn't it more plausible than not?

It seems like you're saying you're kind of a life maximalist, but a UFO minimalist. So tell me, how can you rectify those two things? Because it would seem to me, unless there's a no-go theorem against it, that maybe there is more hope. I get around that by saying, I don't think life exists elsewhere besides the Earth. And if it does, it's from the Earth via panspermic processes. But tell me, what could potentially forbid life? from evolving technologically. Any sufficiently advanced technology

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