Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Famous Inorganic Chemist on Why He Believes Aliens Exist, The Revolutionary Experiments That Could Create Life & How AI Companies Are Deceiving Us

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Are aliens already among us? Are we even looking in the right way to find them?   Renowned chemist, molecular visionary, and University of Glasgow Regis professor Lee Cronin joins Mayim and Jonathan to explore the science behind alien life, consciousness, and the very definition of biology itself. Known for his groundbreaking work in assembly theory and abiogenesis, Dr. Cronin dives deep into the possibility of non-carbon-based life, why the Fermi Paradox might be misleading, and how we could soon detect extraterrestrial civilizations through the mathematics of complexity.   As one of the world’s leading voices in origin of life research, Dr. Cronin offers bold counterpoints to other guests on alien intelligence and reveals why he believes some exoplanets may already harbor advanced technology. He explains how chemical complexity could be the key to recognizing life in the universe, and why traditional astrobiology might be looking in the wrong place.   The conversation also takes a turn toward the dark side of AI: how artificial intelligence may already be used by powerful institutions for dangerous, even covert purposes and why Cronin thinks we should rethink our fear of it. From the dream of building living machines to redefining what counts as life or consciousness, this episode is a mind-bending journey into the future of science, philosophy, and alien discovery.   Learn more about The Cronin Group: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/   Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We haven't seen aliens and life, therefore there isn't any there. The reason we haven't seen them is we don't know how to recognize them, we don't recognize how to communicate, and we don't really know what intelligence is. The Fermi paradox was built upon a false argument. You're saying we may find a planet that has evidence that something lived there. On the average star, it's probably got several planets around it. What percentage of those stars can have life? It could be really quite high.

Life on this planet is carbon-based. What if life is not carbon-based elsewhere? The answer is almost certainly yes. It takes a massive leap in imagination. On Earth, we are a carbon life form with silicon technology. Could we flip it around and imagine a world where their silicon life with carbon technology? We are in a big AI delusion right now.

There are a number of levels where AI is being just misused and people just using it to steal money. What's the hard problem that you're focused on and how are you approaching it? We all want to know why we're here. We all want to have a connection to the cosmos. Hemify's plan is to actually help us crack the origin of life by building the hardware to search chemical space. Solving the origin of life is not going to make life any less wonderful. It's going to make it more wonderful. Hi, I'm I am Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen.

And welcome to our breakdown. Wow. Get ready, people. aliens, artificial intelligence, consciousness, the future of spreading humanity across the galaxy, have we found aliens? We may be looking for the wrong thing. Who is the only person who can talk about all these things? Believe it or not, it's an inorganic chemist. We've talked a lot here about life on other planets. Are they here?

Are they coming? Have they already existed? Do we know how to find them? Lee Cronin is the Regis Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and he's the founder and CEO of Chemify. And Dr. Cronin is going to talk to us about the reason that selection

of complex behavior and complex matter can lead us to a better understanding of how to look for life in the universe, His perspective is it's not even that we're looking wrong. We don't even exactly understand yet how to frame the examination of life on other planets. But he is going to break down for us all the ways to think about it, to reframe it, and also to understand what that means for our lives now. He's also going to help us understand artificial intelligence.

News Alert, he believes they are lying about artificial intelligence, the future of artificial intelligence, what it can do well and what it can't. And some of the sort of more shocking statements and ideas that Lee has is that some of this news cycle is deliberately being generated to pump up stock values and is actually there's not evidence to support it. And in case you're wondering why a chemist can do all these things, he's going to explain to us what the process is of being an inorganic chemist. In addition, he works in computational systems. So he is someone who lives and works in code, in probability, and in understanding how we build complicated things from simple things.

So prepare to have your mind blown by Professor Lee Cronin. Lee Cronin, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. It's great to be here. You're our first chemist that we've had on. Really? Wow. Yep.

Yep. Had a lot of physicists. A lot of internists, but never a chemist. Someone told me yesterday that chemistry is just physics with attitude. Well, the real reason I brought you here is to tell you that I could not get an A in organic chemistry, and it's why I didn't go to medical school. Oh, wow, I'm sorry. Wow. Yeah, that's really too bad.

I actually wonder if, you know, now that I understand the things that I understand about science, if I were to go back, maybe I could. could finally master organic chemistry and give it another go? Organic chemistry is a funny one. I'm on a single crusade against it because I'm an inorganic chemist, right? Which means that I'm allowed to not know anything. But organic chemists pride themselves on the way they train one another, and it's actually pretty brutal.

Can you explain for people who don't kind of know, you know, for many people when they hear chemists, they think, like, that's the person at the pharmacy. Can you talk to us about what it means to be, in your case, a regis and, you know, an expert on inorganic chemistry? Yeah. So chemistry obviously is a central science, sitting between physics and biology and a bunch of other things. And chemistry is just about the electrons. Where are the electrons? And matter. So doing material science, making molecules, designing drugs, making dyes. literally, like I said, chemistry really is physics with attitude, right? And it's because when you start to consider complicated systems, lots of electrons, the chemist's job is to find out where the electrons are, to control reactivity,

to get the design right. So probably the reason why you found organic chemistry inspiring, annoying, whatever the word, is you have to learn these rules, right? where do the where where where how do I what is a recipe I use to make this molecule and where are the where are the bonds and what is react what is going to react was not going to react so chemistry is a bit like taking the periodic table which is the toolbox of which chemists have of all the elements and knowing about their chemistry reactivity I mean I became an organic chemist because I love color changes and also setting fire to things so so I guess that's kind of

the gamut of chemistry, understanding how to build molecules and materials. So in the world that we live in, we're interacting all the time with things, and those things are made of very, very small things. You take it from there and explain what you do again. Okay. So there are these things called atoms, and these atoms have a nucleus, right? And they have got protons and neutrons. The neutrons have no charge, and the protons have a positive charge. Now, to balance that charge, you have electrons on top. And the control of those electrons, in particular what we call the bonding electrons, is what the chemist does.

But the chemist doesn't really look and poke at the electrons, not all the time. They're really about, you know, making recipes to mix together the right materials. So a reaction will occur. But actually, you've got these atoms. The atoms, they increase in charge in protons, as you go from, hydrogen to helium, you keep going through the periodic table, you can get heavier and heavier. The more protons are more electrons. The more electrons, the more chemical diversity. So if you take carbon, which is a really important element, and hydrogen, which is also important, hydrogen can only

bond with one other atom of itself, typically called hydrogen, so you have H2. Carbon can do a lot more. It can make four bonds with different atoms very easily, and it can also have other configurations, less than four bonds, which means you can make chains and you can make kind of, I suppose, like imagine a kind of origami, if you like, of material that can be wrapped together. And that's what we spend our job, our days doing, adding these elements together, heating them up, calling them down, making sure we can purify them to make sure they're clean and full of that we know what we've made. and we then spend a lot of time using very special techniques

to work out what we have, a kind of type of microscope, actually. And that's where you go. So periodic table, reactivity, microscope. That's what the chemist does. So given this framework, you operate on the level of understanding, essentially not just what things are made of, but how they interact. And as we've talked about here, we've had Adam Frank on,

you know, we've had Robin Hansen on. As we've talked about, one of the things that we know is that carbon is this beautiful kind of scaffold from which you can build very, um, reliable structures. And carbon can, you know, create all of the life forms that we have access to and all of the things that we have access to. So we, we live in kind of a, a carbon based world, right? Our Persinium is carbon-based. Yeah. And when we talk about, I mean, you operate on the smallest level, essentially, that one can operate on, pretty much.

But we're interested also in how some of the smallest concepts can apply to some of the biggest questions. So life on this planet is by and law, it's carbon-based, right? Like, everything's carbon-based. Yeah. And when people talk about, could there be life on other planets, most of us come at this from a carbon-based perspective, right? Much as if you're a materialist, you're going to approach everything from a materialist perspective. But you have this sort of notion and part of your work is sort of explaining these concepts.

What if life is not carbon-based elsewhere? How do we get there? So that's a really interesting question. Right now, life on Earth, it seems, and it is very special because we're unique. We don't know of life anywhere else. So what's happening is we're looking at us and going, well, you know, what is special about it? Is it the carbon? Because carbon is really important.

It's water. Water is really, you know, we've got liquid water all over Earth, right? It's not frozen. It's not steam. It's a nice liquid and we can do stuff in the liquid. And as an in order, we're not a little bit. I know that elements can do lots of things, right? I could do stuff with iron, with phosphorus, with silicon.

It's interesting on Earth, we are a carbon life form with silicon technology. And that's kind of cool. Could we flip it around and imagine a world where there's silicon life with carbon technology? I think the answer is almost certainly yes. But it takes a massive leap in imagination. Now, why carbon on Earth? I can give you three very simple answers for that. answers for that. First of all, the size of the Earth and the gravitational strength, right?

It's positioned relative to the sun, so the amount of heat we're getting, okay? And the fact, we've got a nice atmosphere, one atmosphere. So one atmosphere gives us enough pressure to condense water at room, a kind of sea level, 25 degrees Celsius, I have to convert to Fahrenheit. I'm sorry, I'm getting so bad of that, but you know, and so the conditions on Earth, gravity, temperature, and kind of location to the sun, and also the fact where a rocky planet gives us all this material to play with. And it seems that the life that we have on Earth today is a reflection of the chemistry that was happening at the origin of life. It's like there might have been a carbon battle of silicon and the carbon started evolving and then acquired all the resource.

and the sunlight, if you like, and just was able to make a biosphere, and that's why carbon got chosen. That's not the average view, though. Lots of people think carbon is super special. It is special, but it's not special. So the second one is, so is the temperature and the liquid. So they're the other two things. What's special about carbon in particular on Earth is it can form brittle materials, like you

can imagine diamond, and it can form plasticy materials, like even plastics and protein and things like that, which is flexible. You can even make single layers of carbon, which conduct electricity really well. That's called graphene. It's supposed to be a wonder material that we could use to replace all the, you know, all the copper in our electronic circuits one day, maybe. So carbon really is very versatile, and it's everywhere in the universe. So we do know certain things that we can look for when we look for life on other planets, right? And Adam Frank talks about this, and he's literally funded by NASA to do this, right? He looks for signatures.

He looks for biosignatures. He looks for kind of eco-signatures. You know, if we create the mess in the ozone that we create. Miami-Bi-Lex breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience. that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times, especially on the perimenopause journey. That's why we're fascinated by what superpower is doing. They send a licensed professional to your home,

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And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. Ignites and there's enough stuff to stop it blowing up. So basically it's like starting an engine and turning it over. And it's like, lots of stars go and like, oops, sorry, we'll go on. But when you get it at the sweet spot, you've got nuclear fusion happening. So the origin of the sun is to do with. gravity. Gravity is the process by which stars form. You need hydrogen and that's it in a bit of time.

Now let's take life. If we can define life properly, you can say what are the prerequisites for life? Well, you need stuff and what I've come up with is a theory that suggests that there is a force in the universe. We don't really yet understand. we're beginning to understand now, that is responsible for producing life in the same way, the force of gravity produces suns. What is that force? It's selection. I thought you're going to say it's God. I was like, this is going to go a totally different director than I thought. No, no, there is no God. Well, you may call it gravity or you may call it whatever you call it. I just think it's divine because it's unbelievable that we're talking about this. Fair enough. I mean, the hair, the hair.

Where on your head is divide? Like, that's just, it's like the things that happen in the universe are amazing. Well, let's go into selection. Let's go into selection because where I think this may lead us is one of the factors that produce life. Because if we're looking currently for life in a way that may not be how life is in the rest of the solar system, what might it be? So let's talk first about selection. Yeah, so selection. So I'm annoying all the evolutionary biologists in the world right now.

They're all grumpy. And the reason is that this new idea that we've got experimental evidence for, if I call it a new word, right, if I made up a new word, let's call it, I don't know, blah, blah, blah, whatever, like a fancy new word. Everyone said, oh, Lee, you're just making up new words, right? But what I realize is that selection, although evolutionary biologists have commandeered that word, to mean a special thing, there is selection that can occur before biology, right? And all this come back is like, because cells didn't just bring in like magic.

I don't believe in magic. Magic is not a good answer for the origin of life. Anyway, and it may be divine. That's fine, as you said, about such, but magic isn't good enough. So selection is merely when the process where matter interacts and the matter makes a transition, And we'll use these words very carefully, and you can reel me back in and play it back out. So we're really precise because, you know, it should be easy to understand, but it is, it is, requires just a bit of repetition. So you have stuff, let's call it sand.

Sand blows together, clumps together. When the stand starts to turn into a well-defined feature, it becomes an object. That object can do one of two things. It can persist in the environment, stay there, a new object, or it can get ground back into sand and blown away, and it will dissipate, die, or not persist. So in a dynamic environment, that's a very important for initial phrase, in a dynamic environment, selection occurs

when things turn into objects and those objects Despite being under attack by the environment, can persist over time and get copied and renewed and don't turn back to dust. And that process of selection is where evolution begins. I really love this explanation. And I'd like you to frame this in the paradigm that those of us who had to learn biology in a standard university or a graduate program where there's a And we learned this in, you know, you learned this in third grade, fourth grade, right? There's a primordial stew. There's some, you know, I mean, as I pictured it as a child, before I even knew I'd become a scientist one day, there was like a lake, which, again, it's kind of like trying to imagine what nothingness is.

But I pictured this lake, and there was stuff in the lake, not realizing that the lake could only exist once the stuff had created things that allow a lake. But again, there's like some stew, and there's stuff in there. and they told us that lightning comes down and it electrifies the water and then single-celled organisms evolve and then one single-celled organism eats another and then you have a multicellular organism and then we get humans, right?

That's sort of the paradigm. Where does this sand paradigm fit into the paradigm that we've been taught is how literally we got here to have a conversation with satellites in the sky and love in my heart for my children and all the things that happened in the universe. Yeah, that's such a good question.

I mean, the short answer is no one knows because no one has been there, right? I think that's the honest answer. In the same way that probably no one is being up close and seeing the star starting, but we have seen stars that start in the sky, right? And perhaps the, oh, there was a cloud there and now there's a star. That's cool. Oh, there was a star, now there's a black hole.

you know, we haven't seen, we can see cells divide, so we can see biology continuing. We have not seen sufficient complexification to understand how a pre-biotic environment becomes biotic. And that's a question to timescale. And also it's a lack of imagination of the chemists and the pre-biotic dogmatists that are, saying, you know, this is how it happened. And actually, it is caused quite some stagnation in the field. It could have been in a warm little pond. It could have been in the ocean. It could have been in the atmosphere. But I think we're narrowing it down and say, look, you do need an interface. You do need energy. You do need some carbon. And you need selection to occur. And, you need selection to occur.

And what I think is the paradigm that people are really tripping over. Like, you know, what I'm saying is, is it heretical? I don't think it's a heretical, but it's annoying, right? It's like people don't want to hear it. Why? Why do you think people call you a heretic? Well, number one, they think I'm just overblowing, blowing my own trumpet, saying, you know, the assembly theory that I might tell you about the selection is the answer to everything.

And I'm just overly, just making stuff up, right? which I'm like, no, making stuff up is making stuff up, right? You know, what I'm trying to say is, hey, I love to do real-time science. I think my job as a scientist is not only to do really good science, but actually to show people what happens when new science happens. Because there is such an attack on science right now, where people like, they will remain nameless saying, I'm under attack and I'm not taking seriously because my theory of everything,

you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, your fear of everything is just BS, right? It's just because you just made it up. Because there's this process we go through of reasoning. And all I did said, look, science is about problems. And the problem. How did life start? Do we know what life is?

And that's kind of, they're two really interesting problems. Like, well, if we don't know what life is, how do we even know where it starts under what conditions? So I just basically kept replacing the problems of simpler problems. And that's where I got back to this kind of, well, their selection occurs in biology and means one thing. But there is an inorganic selection that can occur before biology because otherwise, how do you get to the cell? And the complexity of the cell, you know, you have to rely on a creator. And my big joke is I'm not a creationist, but I want to be one.

Well, if I make life in the lab, I did it. I'm the creator. I'm God. I get to become God. Now, of course, that's kind of tongue in cheek because I hopefully will set up conditions that are plausible that will occur on other rocky planets, so you can go, oh, there's some rocks, there's some water, there's some carbon, there's this interesting process of complexification that occurs through selection. And look, oh, this is how evolution gets going in this environment. That looks interesting. probably that's what happened on Earth. Well, I just, I mean, the other conclusion is you're not just the God of this planet.

You're the god of all planets. Yeah, yeah, that's the idea to go to the Vatican and say, come on. No, I mean, joking aside, you know, it is a, I do think that we are not being brave enough in nowadays and coming out with new theories. You've got crackpot saying, you're not listening to my theory, and you've got conventional science going, we're too scared to go out on a limb. And I'm like, I'm not, I mean, why be scared? Just do it. What's the worst going to happen? People can tell you're wrong. So my primordial stew story gets to hold, obviously with some modifications. I mean, from the time that I was in, I'm about your age, from the time I was in third grade to the time I was in undergrad, right? Like a lot had already transpired. By the time I got to graduate school, it had changed all. and it's changed, you know, already in the 20 years since I finished. So I want you to help us get from this primordial stew conversation to this inorganic potential for evolution, right, which you're calling selection,

really in the most, you know, secular form of that word. Yes, exactly. How does that open us up to a conversation about maybe we're looking wrong, or maybe the questions that we're asking about life on other planets are not even the right questions. How do we get there? Yeah, so that's really good. So I think the way we get there is to say, look, you make certain assumptions about your primordial soup, primordial stew, right? That it's a warm pond.

There may be some water, some energy, some stuff in there, and things just happen. And you need the ingredients because we're working backwards from what we're. see in our current life. But actually, that doesn't seem to be very plausible because we are so complicated. There's so many weird things that happen. I mean, you know, what is it that decided that I was going to have an asymmetric, I don't know, internal organs and my liver is on one side and on the other end. Yeah, I've got two eyes and all this stuff, right? And of course, a lot of that was controlled by the force of gravity and the amount of material available and the need for competition. And so selection seems to be this thing that, you know, results in a kind of chemical competition, if you like, and resources.

And there's low technology. You can see the origin of life. There was no technology. There was no life. So selection had to produce a kind of primitive technology for competition. You know, capitalism is selection, right? It is. And like all capital, you know, so that's kind of, so that's one side to get that.

there. And the other one is like, because we've been working backwards and saying, look, I need carbon, I need water, I need these things, we look up and say, we need oxygen, we need water, we need water, we need a Goldilocks, though. We need carbon, we need this type of atmosphere. And what it does is allows people to make a load of pronouncements about the planet that we just don't know. I think when I look up in the sky and I go back to that, you know, there's, I think there's five planets, like five types of planet that can be the dead planet, never, ever going to be alive. Poor sad planet, right? Maybe it's something like Mercury. There is a planet that's prebiotic, it's getting it on, right? There's a planet with life on it that is kind of

boring, you know, the first billion years of life on Earth. There's planet with life and complex life and technology. And there's a planet where all life is dead and there might be, well, there's so many other planets, maybe two more now, but you're basically post life and there's just technology, right? They're the kind of planets I could imagine, right? Maybe I could order a six, but something like that. You know, dead and just technological. Or, yeah, and the dead one could have never had life on it, but there's another dead one there were, there's living art. There are artifacts on it that were alive with technology. Hold on. I have to stop you. I have to stop you. Because this is just something that you just talk about at your paper bag lunches

at the university. You just very casually informed us. that there is a planet that you can imagine that had life and sophisticated technology and we might discover this planet and there's no, I don't want to say nobody there because I don't know if they were buddies. I don't know what it was. But you're saying we may find a planet

that has evidence that something lived there and there's technology there. Yeah. Is it made of carbon? I don't know. I haven't been yet. Okay, but okay, I'm going to ask you a super basic question. Why do you believe that there are planets with technology?

Like, that's even, like, for many of us, that's even a leap? Sure. I mean, I agree. It's a massive leap. But here's the thing. If selection is as common as well. gravity. Gravity is really good at making starts. So I think selection, so I'm just extrapolating wildly and that let's suppose that selection is a force in the universe, force of existence,

right? And it happens everywhere. The way you look for this, you say, oh, what I need to do is I need to look for, what is the zone in which I need to look for? I obviously, I can narrow, I can help us narrow it down where the planets need to be. How much any needs to be nearby and stuff like that. So I think we can push into that. But sure, there will be planets in the universe that are dead and just old technologies on them. Maybe, you know, we're lucky if a star nearby goes supernova,

it could get rid of all biology on the planet. Well, okay, so this is what I mean, it's kind of crazy that we're talking about this, but you're the most sophisticated person I've ever gotten to ask this question. What if when we talk about life on other planets, we don't even have the equipment right now with which to see that life. Now, a lot of, a lot of people say, I'm experiencing things. I'm witnessing things.

I believe that I'm being visited by entities or I'm seeing flying saucers. Like, are those the same things to you? Or, you know, when people are like, oh, well, nothing could travel that fast, you know, we know that things have to travel at the speed of light, right? What if that entire framework has to be sort of, I don't want to say thrown in the garbage, but turned upside down to say the method of observation is what actually needs to evolve for us to be able to detect life on other planets? That statement is correct. The method of observation has to evolve to detect life on other planets. I'm not sure I would go so far to say we're being visited right now. I don't think, I have a lot of reasons why we're not, not just like, oh, I'm a materialist and I don't believe it. I've got a lot of other reasons. Why aren't we being visited now? Why isn't that a probable, you know, explanation of there's life and other planets and we know it because they're probing people's anuses.

I always to the anus is with you. Because it's a fantastic story. So I think the biggest problem is space is just so damn big. That's the problem. I think, so there is a real, the answer to the Fermi paradox is a bit like when you're a little seed, I think we're thinking about the universe entirely wrong, but this is probably an entirely new podcast one day about it because I think like, I think that our universe we have created in our own common control space on Earth is bigger than the rest of the universe actually in some regard. And so we're kind of thinking about space and time in the wrong way. The sad part of me makes me think that because we're so far away and our,

what our causal cone will call it, right? Sarah calls it, my collaborator, Sarah Walker calls it a causal cone. I might call it an assembly space. That is when you plant that seed of complexity or that process of selection that produces objects that become more complex, they share a common lineage,

the kind of history so they can basically build technology. As you go up and up and up that commentary, that's a bit weird, then you find two, and then you find ten. and then you find 100, you're like, holy cow, someone, life is here. Similarly, if you went and found a complex molecule, right, or lots of identical cells. So really what you can do is you can get away from the, does it walk, does it talk,

does it have two eyes, does that have gray hair, does it have amino acids, does it have whatever feature? You say, does it have, number one, complexity? We have to define that rigorously. You have to make a new definition. and are there lots of copies? So that means that I'm looking at something, though, that clearly evolved after us, obviously,

because in theory, if we think about complexity the way I believe you do, we would go from less complex to more complex, us being, quote, more complex than what I would be looking at. So the important question I have for you is what could that look like, for things that have existed millions of years before us. Because why do I think I'm first,

unless I'm coming from, you know, a theological right perspective of like, we were placed here and we're special, you know. But let's put that aside because it's not necessary, I don't think, for our conversation. But what happened, you know, Robin Hanson, who we had on, you know, who loves to talk about these things, he's like, oh, it's most likely that there are alien civilizations millions of years old that have already.

far surpassed our technological prowess and have figured out ways to escape our observation and likely are domesticating us. They're just watching and waiting for what we blow up next so they can either dominate, right, because they're far more sophisticated than we are, or they're gaining some sort of surveillance information. I, you know, I mean, what I look at at my computer must be fascinating to aliens. But can you talk a little bit about the lack of presumption necessary for this theory that we are the first. Also, Robin explains that they're likely trying to avoid us escaping Earth and going off into the rest of the solar system because there's an inherent risk in that, but we can pause

that topic and focus on what Miami just said. Yeah, Robin needs to get out more. If an inorganic chemist is telling you to get out more, you need to get out more. Yeah, no, actually, I shouldn't be cheeky, Robert. I love these ideas. I think he's great. But no, I don't agree with it. But one quick correction.

I don't think assembly theory says that life just becomes infinitely complicated. Got it. Right? I think that's important. It's a process. There is a minute. It's like, exactly, like a sun is not infinitely hot. You just need enough to break down and cause fusion.

Okay, got it. So there needs to be enough sophistication so you can bring raw material. in an energy and have Darwin and evolution. And actually, you do have complexity, lots of scales. I mean, like, we have memes now, like, right? Human evolution are people on Twitter and truth social, throwing, basically slagging each other off, right? I mean, it's, it's, but then look, you think about it. The origin of life has allowed us to produce a meme machine where we basically told each other

we're lying on a, on a, you know, on a global scale. And actually, that's what's happening. that's in our technology, enabled by that technology. It's absolutely fascinating. So I think there is a lot of complexity in that you go from, let me all go the way back, because you haven't just got the origin of life problems. You've got the origin of life problem. Then you start to get multicellularity, and then you start to get kind of, you know, plants

and animals and fungi and whatnot, right? And then you get this transition to animals that can build, sensors and they can see the environment. And first of all, they have to just react quickly. So there's no real, what I call reasoning. They just have to react instinctually. So instinct is something that's produced on a long time scale where genetic is evolved. But then actually, then you have to get to instantaneous decision making.

And then language and intelligence and all this stuff. So there's so many layers in your technology and the artifacts that there's a lot we can dig into. Okay, you corrected me about complexity, but it was on the, and I want to return to this in a second because I want to ask you about the next evolution of our kind of conscious experience. But I want you to take me to why would we assume that we're the fountainhead of the evolutionary process at all? And what does it look like or what does it feel like to imagine that we are not the first? we could be millions and millions of years beyond other evolution. Yeah, okay, no, I think that's entirely possible.

I could say that, you know, and I could say that intelligence may have taken a long time to emerge on Earth simply because we had to master oxygen fixation, right? And if the planet had been a different density and different amounts of oxygen and so on, we might not have needed to keep randomly playing around with photosynthesis and then working out how we can increase our energy density. And our IQ, our time-average of IQ as a planetary species, may have been a lot higher. I mean, it took us billions of years to get here. That was one dumb planet for a really long time.

So, you know, so I think you're entirely right. There's no reason why we should assume we are the fountain, except for the following. that you think about you've got origin of the universe, then you've got first sun, first stars, well first, then you've got your first galaxies, stars explode, stars explode and reduced material, material forms planets, planets then allows you to then start origin of life. So you have got a fundamental time limit,

like how long does it take for the first star to form, how long does it then take for that star to explode, and then to form another planet, another planet around another star. So you have, there is a few billion years, right? And where are we? 13.7 billion years. So how much quicker could life had emerged on in our universe? It's a very interesting question. Could have happened faster. And from that point of view, I mean, Robert is right, I would say. I mean, some people would say intelligence still hasn't fully evolved on this planet. Maybe we need more oxygen. We're going to hit pause here. There's so much more to

about with Dr. Cronin. So we're going to pause here. We're going to release part two, which will include assembly theory, which is what his laboratory focuses on, as well as the other incredible research and amazing things that he is working on in his lab. We're also going to talk about consciousness and what does he think about love and more spiritual components of the intuitive process, the creative process. Please stay tuned for episode two with Dr. Lee Cronin. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you follow anywhere you get podcast to make sure that you are notified of episode two and come join the breaker community, the growing breaker community on Substack. It is our platform where we release never before

seen footage, have deep conversations with Miami and Jonathan and special guests that you can't see anywhere else. We hope to see you over on Substack and we can't wait for you to hear part two of our interview with Dr. Lee Cronin. It's Miami-Bi-Ollics breakdown. She's going to break it down for years. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two One fiction, one. And now she's gonna break down.