Modern Wisdom - #518 - Lee Cronin - What Will Alien Life Look Like?

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Lee Cronin is the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Head of the Cronin Group Lab and CEO of Chemify. The job of deciding what life is, how it originates and the different forms it could take might sound like a task for UFO theorists but it's actually in the realm of chemists like Lee. This means that some of the biggest questions humanity has rest on his lab's shoulders. Expect to learn why Lee believes that there is life everywhere in the universe, his theory on the origin of life here on earth, why we haven't seen any aliens yet, whether Robin Hanson's Great Filter hypothesis is true, what common traits all types of life will have, the most exotic types of life forms Lee has imagined and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Our Sponsor - get 25% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/wisdom (use code: MODERN25) Extra Stuff: Lee's Lab - http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/  Follow Lee on Twitter - https://twitter.com/leecronin  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Lee Cronin, he's the regiast chair of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, head of the Cronin Group Lab and CEO of Chemify. The job of deciding what life is, how it originates and the different forms it might take, sounds like a task for UFO theorists, but it's actually in the realm of chemists like Lee. This means that some of the biggest questions humanity has rests on his lab's shoulders. Expect to learn why Lee believes that there is life everywhere in the universe. His theory on the origin of life here on Earth, why we haven't seen any aliens yet, whether Robin Hansen's great filter hypothesis is true, what common traits all types of life

will have, the most exotic types of life forms Lee has imagined, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lee Cronin. Am I right in thinking that you're in Scotland now? Yeah, I mean Glasgow. Given the fact that we might be talking a lot about adaptation in this conversation, how have you adapted to understanding the accents of everybody that's around you in Glasgow? Did that take time? I'm still struggling. I think the thing that I'm getting better at though is being water repellent. Because it's so rainy. Yes. Well, as someone that's from the northeast of England, I feel your pain. Yeah. Yeah. It's a strange climate up there. What does life is the universe

developing a memory mean? I'm not sure I know now. It seemed like a good phrase at the time. Now, I think it's the simplest way I can describe the process by soulless matter or stuff that's not directed is able literally to act on other stuff by experiencing stuff in stuff. Now that sounds a bit weird, but I can unpack that because it's kind of interesting in that I think that I realized in the last few months that there is this transition to kind of from sand, if you like, all the way to cells, but actually via kind of functional objects. So you think of sand on the beach and the sand has no memory, so the wind is blowing around and maybe water is coming in, but maybe every now and then, from clumps of sand,

maybe that some clumps of sand get blown together in a triangle, and then become resistant to weathering from either side. And that triangle is able to kind of remain, exist for time, and if that triangle can have a material effect on other sand, next door, and that carries on, you can see maybe how the triangle could literally make lots of triangles.

And so that in a way is like a little rudimentary memory because the effect of that, that chance arrangement has a material influence on the future. And so it's those little bit little things that occur in the universe able to then remember that by physically building things, I think what I mean. As opposed to say, I don't know, you know, if you've got a flame and you burn things, the material that came before is destroyed no longer exists, so it has a harder time to have an influence on the future. And I suppose it's literally meaning that the past has an effect on the future because of the state of the past, like, you know, what the shape of the object is. So that's really what I mean is that the past really does have a meaning, which is obvious probably to us, but not to physicists who basically think the past doesn't exist.

Hmm, I learned about slime molds a couple of weeks ago. And they, I'm aware that they were jumping ahead and we're getting into something that is definitely life, but they kind of have a memory thing, right? They leave hormones or they secrete pheromones and leave them around. And then when they go back, they can know not to go to this particular but this is a mold. Yep. They can train them to go through mazes and shit. Yeah exactly. I mean slime molds are really good at doing that bacteria are able to communicate by that. So it's all this kind of this idea that's constraints because the thing about the problem with life, the difference between life and non-life, you know when you've got life like a slime mold or sand, right? Someone said, here's some sand, here's some slime mold, can you tell the difference?

Most people would be able to tell the difference, but that's that jump that you need to go through to get from sand to a slime mold that people really had trouble with. And I think this understanding that the universe is kind of life is the process by which the universe not only has memories but starts to initiate the process of recording those memories and making them more and more sophisticated so we're able to go to abstract them. So you're the going from sand to super intelligence is actually a fairly obvious thing that should happen in the universe, believe it or not? What is the most difficult step as far as you can see from something which is completely not alive to something which is maybe as alive as alive can be? Is it the origin of life?

Is it going from single cell to multi-cellular organism, is it not destroying yourself with global warming? Where along that spectrum can you see the biggest great filters? Oh, I think I can think of three or four really interesting transitions, the way to put it. And so the first one is like, let's say the first transition is from the random to the physical world where statistics, rules, and particles are everywhere to the chemical world where things are a little bit less random because there's little bits of memory, bonds. You can cut diamonds, they have faces, and so on, so they have features. That distribution narrow slightly.

What would be an example of the first type? Just, I suppose, very basic particles, say hydrogen gas moving around, right? Graffiti would tend to bring it together, so you're clumped together and you build a star, okay? But then, when you go to, so you've got this transition from in physics and chemistry to then biology, to, so you've got this transition from in physics and chemistry to then biology,

biology, so let's say physics is just statistical, mess, but Gaussian mess, biology is also a mess, but biology is quite good at reproducing almost the same features. So if you have a twin or you have some identical cells, they'll be different, but you could see that they were the same thing, or that, or couple of cats. So, but they wouldn't be like just random mess, there'd be a narrow distribution, you identify other cats. And then if you go from cats to the iPhone, several iPhones, you look inside the iPhones, the iPhones would be pretty much identical, same PCB, same kind of transistors if they're the same type. So the distribution would narrow almost to a thin line. So you have broad distribution, kind of random one,

narrow one, for biology, and a thin line for technology. So what is really interesting is that transition from kind of a random distribution to a less random distribution for biology, which is evidence of evolution, and then evolution to technology. So you're saying, what is the hardest jump? Well, I think the hardest jump is basically, because we don't yet understand the force, if you like, that able to initiate evolution. Everyone

thinks that evolution is something that only exists in life. But if that's the case, where did the life come from? And you have this proverbial, I think it's not impossible to understand how you go from a single cell to a multi-cell. Hard, we're not impossible. Not impossible then to go from multi-cell to animal and then animal tool-making to consciousness and stuff. But so that first jump from the sand to the cell, the molecular machines, is something we have no handle on because it occurs in the molecular regime. And so this is where the chemists need to be doing their detective work. So I think that we should nail it soon, but it is fascinating that we have no idea what happened, none. That's the current state of the origin of life research,

is that we have no idea how it happened. I mean, I think I have an idea, but that's because I'm biased, I'm doing experiments, I have an inkling, I think I feel like I'm the first to a party like the electricians, when people were in electricity, you had all these arguments between the voters and the electricians when people were running electricity. You had all these arguments between the voters and the ampers and people, some people thought electricity was a liquid,

some people thought it was, you know, they didn't really know because there was static electricity. So people's hair standing on end, there were batteries and there was this paradigm where no one knew it was a free-for-all. So, and not everyone was completely right and no one was completely wrong, but it was a spectrum. And I think right now we have what we call pre-biotic chemists who basically retro-go back and just try and recreate the events. We have biologists who say, ah, chemistry is easy, we just get to genes and go from there. And then you have people who are trying to understand the origin story to say, well, we need to kind of let go of life on earth as being the only thing and say, what general process gave rise to life? And I'm probably the first in a new discipline of people that are willing

to say that this is a non-surable question. And in fact, I have experiments running in my lab right now, literally to shaking sand in a box, hoping for slime mold to come out, or maybe something a little bit less scary than the slime mold, right? You're shaking sand in a box to just see what happens. Literally, I mean, it's a bit more chemically sophisticated, so it probably would have some water. And in that water, we'd have some mineral, some mineral rocks. And those rocks kind of act like, you know, the beginnings of, if you can etch a rock and have a little cave in it or a chance crack, that crack becomes a place where a memory can be born because that crack maybe can trap some molecules, and those molecules will

be given a safe harbor from the environment. So those molecules can basically react with each other to make another molecule. And if they come together, you'll keep building more and more possibilities to explore chemical space. And then in chemical space, there are some special molecules called replicators, which only occur very rarely, but those molecules are able literally to fabricate each other, or even better fabricate each other in groups. So it's almost like imagining having a, you know, if you have someone fabricating a table in a chair, like carpenter, you know, imagine that the table fabricates part of the chair, and chair fabricates part of the table.

And together the table chair exists as an entity and that's how the thing evolves because it doesn't need the carpenter. It's a symbiotic relationship. And that's the thing that we're searching for in the sand shaker in my lab. Why would it be sand with water given the fact that life is carbon-based?

Yeah, good point. Because I mean, carbon is just a useful element because it can make a large number of strong interaction. So the reason why you know, you think plastic and flex it and bend it and so on, that's what was based on carbon. And carbon has that property to make what we call polymers. And those polymers are really versatile. And so on the planet Earth, the carbon was in the form of methane and probably carbon dioxide, the simplest forms of carbon. And then what happened was, as low as, you know, there's obviously hot rock coming out from the

scent of the earth and there was water probably. And the methane would probably start to form tar. Reactive oxygen formed tar sugars, not living sugars, just really, really terrible, gooey black tar. The CO2 would also react. And so these polymerization reactions would happen, but they would happen in the sand. And the sand would act as like a catalyst or a controller to basically, you know, direct the outcome of those reactions. So literally, my lab is like a load of methane and carbon dioxide in a load of sand being heated up. It's a kind of messy pile of junk. And is there a machine, a little automated machine, sifter that's just wiggling boxes?

We can do shaking, but we do stirring, and we have networks, and the way to, we have light basically, and looks like a load of different test tubes. So maybe say a rack of test tubes or two racks, but they wouldn't be isolated. They'd be connected like a network, so we kind of make the chemical internet. So what we could do is we could transfer the contents of one test tube to another to seed or the different test tubes. So we literally take really spread all the material around for maximum searching of the chemical space. really spread all the material around for maximum searching of the chemical space. So how do you define life? What's the difference between life and not life?

Physically, no idea. In fact, I would say, I mean, I'm being facetious in the way, but I think it's really important. I think that I will now contradict that and say, of course, this is a definition of life. In matter, if you take a, let's say if I take a snapshot of you frozen in time, you would be as dead as a rock, right? I've seen, you know, I take the same snapshot. I would not be able to know you're alive. So it's not just a stuff in you, right? You know, if you shed a tear, the water came from a living eye, but the water doesn't have any emotion, it's just water, maybe some salt in it or something. So people get really stuck thinking that life, they have to kind of say, life has these properties of, you know, you've got a metabolism, you've

got all this stuff and whatever. And I think that's far too hard, because you end up having to take a survey, a focus group. Hello, alien. Can you please take these following questions? If you say yes to most of them, you'll be alive. Do you respire? Yes. Do you evolve?

Do you metabolize? Yes. And so, and now that God, it's stuff is, it's kind of got really stuck because then if you say to COVID-19, is COVID-19 alive? It's a virus particle. Most people say no viruses are dead. Like, well, okay, good no problem, no pandemic. Well, of course, that's incorrect. When a virus particle gets into your cell, it hijacks the cell, gets its nuclear material replicated, makes lots of copies of itself, leaves a cell, goes around, can tell it's a life cycle. So a friend of mine who was the last person to touch the hubble,

is an astronaut. I try to convince him of this about life, so I said there's no difference between him, the astronaut and a virus particle. Except when he's in space, he's like a virus particle. He can't have children. When his oxygen runs out and everything runs out, he's going to be a dead astronaut. He has to come back to earth and on earth, he's able to breathe, have kids, or look after his kids, whatever, do stuff. So the current notion of life that we have is not appropriate. So now I ask a different question to, is something to live, is to say, okay, let me take you

or an object and you say, right, is this a product of a living system or evolution? And I have a way of telling, giving you an answer to that question without, with almost 100% accuracy. And so what I define life as, life is a process that can build objects that cannot form in a random environment. So I'll say that again. Life is characterized by the ability to build stuff in abundance that can't form by random chance So you can think about DNA and proteins and cells But you could also think about this mouse this mouse if we go to PC world and buy ten of these mice It's a Microsoft mouse. It's probably okay. If you found ten of these mice on Mars

You wouldn't say oh my god. It's a random rock. You'd be like that's weird and Microsoft mouse, it's probably okay. If you've found 10 of these mice on Mars, you wouldn't say, oh my God, it's a random rock, you'd be like, that's weird. There's 10 electronic things. It look like a mouse, I've found back on Earth. They're identical. This must be proof that life has been here. It might have dumped the mouse myself and ran away.

But those objects, they don't need to be alive themselves, but they are readout on life. So I think, don't ask if you're alive, ask if you can leave artifacts that prove to other people who follow your trail that you were alive. When you do that, they're so liberating, because then you see, flame isn't alive, the spot on Jupiter is not alive, clouds aren't alive. But if you found, you know, 10 identical clouds in the sky with lots of features, you would know they weren't clouds that were

the evidence of life in the atmosphere. So you're not saying that the mouse is alive. What you're saying is that something which seems to present a highly ordered environment that couldn't come together by chance is either life or an artifact that shows that life was there. Exactly. So this is intrinsically related to time and entropy in that case. Yes. How? Yes. Why? Well, you might know that I'm not really a lover of entropy or well, you can choose one or the other, right? You can choose entropy or choose time. And so what I mean by that is,

because we live in a universe, the physicists think that time does not exist, we have to have this thing called entropy. And so what that means is that in any, the universe is entropy is expanding, which is another way of saying the universe is asymmetric in this time. So entropy is just this, it's actually a kind of nonsense term, I feel bad for Boltzmann because I'm a chemist, but I love setting thirons of stuff, right? And I'm not saying

that the second law of thermodynamics is a falsehood. I'm saying that the second law of thermodynamics is a misrepresentation of how the universe works. Lots of people think the universe is going to end a heat death. I don't think that's necessarily guaranteed. Why? Because I think the universe is going to basically end up just building stuff. I think there's a series of ratchets and humanities has been doing it, technology ratchets. And what happens is that basically we take all the available energy and resource and by abstraction we build machines that can then harness more energy and reach more sophistication we go up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and I don't think that needs

to be a heat death, we can regatter those. Now that means that actually there's something very interesting about what we mean by spontaneous processes and entropy over time. But I'm not saying that time doesn't exist, time must exist. And because time exists, the universe expands. And because the universe expands, there's more space over which you spread stuff out, which is what the second law in entropy says. But that doesn't necessarily say that everything has to spread out in dark. Right? There needs to be enough resource to get there, but we just don't know enough about it. And I like

to poke the physicists, but I don't want to go too far because entropy is a useful measure of labeling or if you look at tooth, if I give you some snapshot of a room, they take the same my office here and I put some neon gas in my room. Oh no, let's say some radon gas. So I wouldn't want to be here because it would be radioactive, but I had some goggles and I could see the radioactivity and I put in a plume of radon gas in one call the room, it would be look like ghostbusters, you have green plume, right? So what would happen? That would be a T equals zero.

What would you predict would happen at T equals one hour? Well, the radon gas would spread out uniformly in the room and you'd kind of have this green haze. So you would basically, when I give you those two photographs, which is the beginning and which is the end, you would look at it and go, oh, that's the beginning, the end. You would assign that. You would label it. And so the funny thing about that is that you have to be the labeler, but you could somehow

take all those molecules. And if you flip all those molecules back, you could push them back into the corner. You would do work on them. And that work would be against the second law. It takes some energy and you know that that's all kind of accounted for. So I'm not saying there are perpetual motion machines, but I'm saying that probably the energy of the universe is not constant. The energy of the universe is increasing and that energy of the universe increasing is because of time and that's what dark energy is. The mismatch in dark energy in the universe is not dark energy, it's just evidence of time. I think. Go into that for me. So there are two things in the universe we don't understand. There's dark

matter. What that means, if you look at all the galaxies right now and you calculate the, you look at the size of the galaxy and the rotation and the fact there's a compact mass. If you do calculations with gravity, sorry, you do calculations of that observable mass, and you look at the structure of the galaxy, the galaxy should not be holding the galaxy flying apart. So some of the mass is missing.

So the physicist said, well, we can't see it, let's just call it dark matter and there's stuff in there. I think that's okay. That could be a hint that something wrong with gravity, but I think most physicists are of the, are fairly comfortable the fact that there's some non-luminousant stuff that's in the galaxy called dark matter, gravity attracts together, galaxy is lovely and fine. So that's dark matter, let's not worry about that. But there's this other thing called dark energy that we need to somehow understand the rate of expansion of the universe and to balance things out.

And we just don't know what that is or where it comes from. My wild idea is that the amount of dark energy in the universe was zero at t equals zero because there was no time. And as the universe increases, the energy expands in time, the energy of the universe increases because of the energy associated with space. And because time came first and produced space, the energy associated with space is just inflating. So it's almost like the singularity at the beginning is pulling energy from non-space, which seems really weird, but that is really weird and inflating into space.

And we're actually measuring that evidence of that is dark energy. How do the physicists feel about this idea? They just don't talk to me about that. They just ignore it, I think, because they are for some reason, time is an emerge. They have to, well, well they what they feel about it is just think I'm talking complete nonsense truth be told some physicists who think that there's the but they're well no actually not entirely let's be fair they are confused because I am unable to give a precisely defendable theory around that. But what I say is like, well, for the universe to have an origin, what we have right now, the universe must have had lots of order at the beginning.

Everyone agrees this entropy that we get, this order at the beginning is running down the clock of the universe. So if the physicists are right and entropy is expanding, increasing with the universe, that we something put that order there at the beginning. And that means the initial conditions of the universe were set. That means what happens to the universe actually is pre-controlled by the initial conditions. That all the questions you're going to ask me today were not decided by you in the last few hours or by you doing some research, but for the universe at the beginning. So the first photon that came into existence, then we're underpriced, and we're breaking,

so that all happened. That's clearly nonsense. And the reason why that's clearly nonsense is there's not, there wasn't the information capability in the universe there. So that means there's something wrong when you're saying the initial conditions prescrible the future because they couldn't barely, they could barely prescribe the next moment. So actually the physicists are in a trap in the origin of the universe requires order. And if you give that, you can get rise to second law, time is emergent, causations emergent, but you have to predict this order from somewhere. So, and then you have to make these four beliefs.

So, order at the beginning, time is emergent, causations emergent, second law. If I just say there's time, and it's asymmetric, you don't need those four beliefs because the second law is obvious, you don't need it. You don't need order to be in the past because there's just time going forward, there's always going to be more disorder or a larger space from which you spread out your matter in the future. So all that breaks down, but that requires the physicists has to give up the initial conditions. And that's really hard. I can't imagine why they don't want to play with you, given the fact that

you're curling one out in the middle of their lovely, very well-established set of rules and procedures that everything's been based upon. Well, I mean, I do think that they're the standard model and the Newtonian dynamics we've got and the Einsteinian dynamics are pretty damn good, pretty damn good, planes, trains, automobiles, go to the moon, making transistors. So physicists have got strong, you know, it works. However, it doesn't predict life and novelty and creativity. And the fact that we realize there's something wrong with our universe is the fact that human beings are able to be creative and almost think beyond the edge of the universe.

When you have a creative thought, that thought is almost existing beyond the edge of the known. And then you can take that thought and actualize it in the known universe. You're going to say... You're going to come up against physical, real restrictions. You can think things that you can't do. Sure, but you can also think things that you can then have a material impact in the universe. Unless you thought of them, they wouldn't have happened. So SpaceX, Elon Musk, decided to land a rocket on Lex, someone invented that in their head, and they now rockets land on Lex. I have in my Twitter bio locally reversing entropy as

little tagline. It's been there for ages. I heard it in a podcast years ago. That, it kind of is one of those, is that an accurate statement to say that human beings and life does locally reverse entropy? Yes, I think it's more than that. I think what you're, what that is a marker, that's a very nice way of saying gently that the causation that the causation and memory in the universe is a thing. And what you're able to do by local, so let's think about the thought experiment. So what you can do when people think about reversibility, and you say, right, we're going to do an experiment. Let's imagine a universe of out time, but hang on, you have to stop.

It requires time to do that. It's kind of insane that to have to imagine a time where there is no time, you have to stop and time goes by. It's kind of insane. And it's almost like saying, right, let's imagine a universe in which all the prime numbers are available, okay? Tell me all the prime numbers are available, but you don't need that.

You need a resource called Time to actually mind the prime numbers. So the existence of ever increasing prime numbers is evidence of time exists. I can't steal money from your bank account. Well, not that I would try, but let's say I'm just by breaking your encryption key is evidence of time exists. So, the physicists will all be rich otherwise. So, this locally reversing entropy is a bit about saying, well, we need to do work on our environment.

By doing work, we can position objects where we want them to be, which fights disorder, we set the initial conditions we can make objects and so on. And that's kind of the way that I started to build assembly theory, which is from controlling those initial conditions and causation. And I just think that, you know, I think that entropy hasn't really done very much for us. It should have done more. I like that idea. Okay, so going back to what you touched on earlier on about the origins of life. You have an inkling, you're the first guy at the party. Is it tar and primitive sugars or what's going on? What do you think?

So going to the origin of life, I think it's a really important question. I think it goes beyond that. What I'm trying to do in my lab, not just in my lab, but collaborate in the US and Germany and all around the world. Lots of people coming to the buy at the same time. But there's a physicist I'm working with, with ASU, who's kind of on the same page there. And what we think is happening is that selection, the process of selection, making memories, can occur before biology and life.

And selection occurs in stuff, where there's just any physical stuff selection can start. And so what that allows us to understand is that selection in matter predates biology, by a long way, and that starts to weave those memories. And over time molecular machines get built. And those molecular machines are recruited by the available chemistry you have on earth. So the origin of life is about inventing selection, I think, and selection comes before biology. And that's what our inkling is. And so on earth, that leads to carbon-based life, but I think elsewhere there's going to be loads of other possibilities. So I think that we want to understand how selection predates evolution.

And I think that we've come up with, we understand there's almost like a new force in the universe that selection drives complexification, such to the point where systems can be, this is a, I don't like this phrase, but I'll use it anyway, becomes self governing, self referencing. phrase, but I'll use it anyway, becomes self-governing, self-referencing. And when an object cares about its own existence in time, it's on the way to life. Because you have a number of ways existing. If you're a rock, you just sit there and do nothing, and you're can't made of hard stuff. But if you're sand, you'll get blown away and broken up all the time. And the fact that we exist, you know, the meaning of life is like existence, literally just one word, existence through adversity. Because you're, because

there's weathering and so on, selection allows you to build repair mechanisms. So what we're doing in the lab is we're building experiments from the inorganic world that go select, go and undergo selection. In this case, they work with organic molecules, and they start to produce molecules that will turn into a kind of biology. But I'm pretty sure the biology we have on Earth, the life we have on Earth is unique to Earth. There is no other biology in the entire universe.

And if we, I mean biology, I mean proteins and DNA and the specific nature of the stuff, but life is everywhere and I think that life is likely to be as common as, you know, stars. And, hang on. So life on earth is completely unique, but life in the universe is wide spread. Yes. So, the, your view it seems is we have very myopic understanding of what life consists of because we're only looking at carbon-based, this particular atmosphere has to respirate,

has to do the sex thing to make more of itself and replicate and stuff like that. And your view is much broader than that, that there are essentially as many ways to create life as there are potentially planets to have life on. Yeah, and I think there will be commonalities like in stars, just in... I'd like, if you took our star at the center of our solar system, if you just... if we just pretended we couldn't see any other stars in the sky, there was just one star, we would probably look up in the sky and look at the star and obsess about how did it form, what were the conditions that made it, and all that stuff, and obsess, obsess, obsess. Now the shroud has been taken and we can classify stars everywhere, you know, by the luminosity and the size and so on and their spectrum that we know that basically

there's a whole statistical distribution of stars and which our star is one of those. And I wonder if we could, I don't know, if we ever will be able to serve a life in the universe that we'll see life like that. And then it's kind of cool to think about that because what I would like to do is convince NASA and ESA say, well, look, we have telescopes, so JWST, we should try and look for survey styles and planets and try and look for

planets that may be of a rocky planet, similar condition, similar mass. Why? Because we know that life like us that works on the second to hour-to-day timescale exists there, and that's why we might be our best chance of identifying aliens, because probably life can exist anywhere, but it's the timescale right for us to talk to, is the chemistry right for us to recognise, you know, there's so many variables, so contingent that it's going to be really hard to understand. What are some of the commonalities that you're going to see between our life? Between most life, should I say? I would guess, and this is just guess because we've just got life under after evolution, we common because selection and evolution go together so you'll have an

entire ecosystem where there be lots of life form, different life forms sharing common machinery. So that'd be one thing. I would think the probably the ability to have some kind of computing, not computing device, some kind of information processing device, some sensors, maybe depending on the mass of the planet. Imagine, you know, can imagine if life started on a planet where the gravity was less strong, we might not have needed to wait so long to get to multi-serial life form because one of the reasons why it took so long is we needed to develop oxygen metabolism. Oxygen metabolism took ages to develop. Why do you think that? It could be because of gravity. Yeah, because of gravity was strong. Oxygen gives you more energy, just really

super boost. Just fighting against earth. Yeah, so if the gravity gravitational strength was less Maybe so maybe glad um, maybe earth is at the bottom of the class in IQ because it took so long to get intelligent Hmm and on a Planet that didn't have as much gravity The organisms would be able to grow more quickly, which means that they would be able to become more sophisticated more quickly and they'd be able to develop

and become a type three civilization. Okay, that's interesting. What about other exotic forms of life? So I watch a channel called Melody Sheep. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of it. Dude, you would adore this YouTube channel. So these guys make documentaries on YouTube, about one every year to year and a half,

and they're usually between 30 and 60 minutes long. The whole thing's beautifully sound scaped and rendered in 3D. It looks like it should be on Netflix. And they've done, I think, a three-part or a four-part series, which is looking at different ways that life could have evolved on other planets. What would have happened if it was very high gravity?

What would have happened if the atmosphere was unbelievably more dense? You can have these creatures that are kind of like whales, but they surf through the air. And then they moved on to what they called very exotic types of alien life. And one of the ones that they mentioned, which is why I brought up with the sand earlier on, is silicon-based life. And they said that if you had silicon-based life, metabolism could be so slow that thoughts

might take millions of years. And this is my only tangential bit of consumption, apart from your work that I've had into this world. So can we have Silicon Life, what other exotic types of life are there and can thoughts take a million years? Well, I think a thought can take as long as it needs, as long as the environment doesn't change such that you break registry. So, I mean, in some years, I don't know, I'm going to watch this YouTube channel, thanks for to you. I think you'll absolutely love it, man. It's so good. I think that you thoughts could take, let's say days, because I think, you know, Silicon

is, actually, Silicon might be faster, because Silicon can move electrons around. You know, we might have diamond brain, there might be aliens with diamond brains, right? So, or graphene brain, because of what you can have is you can have highly-ordered carbon and have these networks. And if you don't have the networks, it might be such that you can just basically say, here's a big diamond, we'll use that as an information storage medium. And wherever we break, we have dangling bonds and diamonds or defects, that can be, you know, I'm just making stuff up. So, the problem that we have dangling bonds and diamonds or defects, that can be, you know, I'm just making stuff up. So the problem that we have imagining silicon life

is that silicon requires high pressure, high temperature, all this stuff to happen. But I don't know what the lifespan would be. If you're talking about millions of years, we could do the math. Humanity's been around for a few hundred thousand years thinking. And so if we, do the math. Humanity's been around for a few hundred thousand years thinking. And so, if we, and the universe has been here for about 13.7 billion years, so it's, you know,

1,300, 1,370 million years, so probably not because we won't have had many thoughts since the beginning of the universe. Yes, I understand. Okay, what are the exotic forms of life have you considered that there might be out there? Oh, I think silicon's a good one. I think on Venus, we might have complex chemistry getting to there. I think that there might be different forms of life on Titan and Europa based on carbon, but completely different, weird stuff because it's liquid alkane is very cold. So, the type of chemistry you've got available is not going to be as rich as you have on earth because you won't have the set of compounds. But really, the periodic table is pretty big. But what I think you're going to

see is that when stars form, we know that stars go for a fairly normal kind of life cycle. So they undergo fish and they keep building up elements and complexity so more and more heavier and then the star explodes Then that material creaks and then what happens is a heavier stuff goes to the center and you get fractionation So I think the most planets will present rocky planets will present with you know I am a nickel core lighter elements on the outside. So I'm, I think exotic life would be very kind of exotic, but not completely outrageous. I don't know if you know the, but by Andy we're the, the Hail Mary. Yes, yeah, where he has that creature, what it made of, what's like, what's it made

of? So it's made of, so mercury blood, but by, by, kind of biological, but kind of inorganic and hot temperatures, quite a cool. I like, I like the, the research, research gone into that. So I'm not sure I could buy the life form and have a mercury blood because that's really heavy and really like, okay, you'd have to have a lot of mercury, but, but it is a very readily available liquid, right, under a, large, large of conditions. But I think, to be honest, with you, we simply don't know. And I'm a chemist existing on planet Earth, one atmosphere, 25 degrees Celsius, liquid water. Imagine what a chemist on Jupiter would look like, under several

million pastures of pressure, where hydrogen is not only a liquid, it becomes a metal and it conducts electrons, right? So it's like super interesting. So I would just say, no, I wouldn't have a bet against anything, but I would bet that you would need to be able to measure the complexity of the object using the kind of way I discussed earlier, looking for artifacts and examples of non-statistically formed objects that you could discern from the background. Given the fact that you think there's going to be life not only out there in the universe but in planets that are next door to us, within our own solar system, are you concerned that this has implications for the great filter

hypothesis, Robin Hansen's thing, where he says that it's an answer to the Fermi paradox, there's something big that all civilizations need to get past. If we find life elsewhere, this means that we've got some huge filter to come up against. No. I think there's another big filter. You know what the big filter is? Expanding space and the speed of light. Oh, that you can get captured in some corner of...

Well, it's hard to get from place to place. I mean, okay, what's more likely that we're moving faster from, from, from, from away from each other to approaching the speed of light, or that we've all, I think that, I think the human life on earth is in danger in the end, but life on earth is in danger in the end, but life on earth is gonna do just fine. I mean, why that? Why human life's in danger? Well, because wait until SkyNet comes,

it's gonna have much more fun. It'll be resilient to the expanding sun, you know. I mean, you think we're gonna get AGI, don't have existence? No, I think, I mean, we weren't, I mean, I'm being really flippant, but we're already become cyber-physical right now. You know, we'll have my phone and connected with that, and then we'll have more and more interactions with technology.

And I'm very hopeful about the future of life on Earth. Obviously, humans are going to transition. The race we're in right now, we're in a race to not be idiots. We're in base to educate each other and give every one a degree of equity with the population and to try and we're trying to get out of this view that there are limited resources and we need to basically kind of have certain people constrained because of those resources. Once we really, we understand we no longer resource constrained the technology, the humanity is going to have a field day. It's going to be so fascinating watching it the latter half of the century. We need to kind of sort

out climate change and ensure it's dangerous and sure crops could fail and water. But you don't want to happen if crops fail and water scares a lot of people will die. Tragedy, sure, I don't want to die, but not everyone will die. And then humanity will go again. So, you know, I don't think there's a great filter. I think maybe there's a great filter on his imagination. Oh, dear me, Robin Hansen. I understand your idea around the fact that, and this is similar I'm going to guess to the ratcheting thing that you said from earlier on. I understand your idea that technology opens up capabilities that you can't see. It's like the unknown unknowns of progression that you can move through.

I also think, yes, a lot of the problems that we're coming up against that look like ex-risk from the outside are probably not true existential risks. As in 100% of all humans are extinguished or that we are irreversibly put into a situation that we can't get back from, whatever it is, irreversible civilization or collapse, two versions of X-risk. I don't think, I think you're right. There's some, maybe, you know, the bioengineered weapons,

not tremendously fantastic, pretty fucking robust, probably gonna do a good bit of damage, but even nuclear war, you know, you set up all of the nukes on the planet, it doesn't kill everybody. No, it's not nice, and it wouldn't be fun for quite a while, but it doesn't kill everybody.

So yeah, you're right, humans are very, very resilient. And then you're, so would you class yourself as a techno optimist? I don't even know what that really means, but I hear people say it on the internet and I feel like I should use it. Um, I think that, um, well, I'm trying to get commandable matter, right? I'm trying to create origin of life.

I'm trying to, I'm, you sound like Thanos. No, because Thanos, no, no, no command of all matter. All, but I mean, I'm trying to literally program matter digitally. So I want to get digital control of matter to basically build stuff. And I just need information and energy for that. There's enough energy coming from the sun for me to transform all the matter on earth over time. In fact, by what he's been doing it arguably.

I am an optimist and I think that we should enable people to have a growth mindset. We've got political difficulties and so on. There's all sorts of interesting things that humanity is coming. We understand what economics is. we understand what creativity is, we're understanding that we are pretty interesting in a causal chain that we're worth preserving. And I think that this kind of, we're also understanding that our culture communicates some very deep and important truths about our past into the future that we don't know yet how to write down. You know, we are recording some of it. and we're perhaps even if it's like in the manifestation of YouTube and TikTok. So yeah,

I would say I'm a techno optimist and not just because I'm living in some bubble somewhere because I can see as a chemist, what has chemist done chemist done last 50 years, we've stopped the population from starving, we've decreased infant mortality, we have basically cleaned up the environment, yes, and we need to do it again, and oh dear, we have to remove the plastic, and oh dear, we have to remove the CO2, but we'll do it again, and we'll keep doing that. And I think the great filter, perhaps, the really great filter is climate change when the sun expands and gulfs the earth, but even then we might have pushed the earth back a bit or evolved into you know.

I was learning, and as Sandberg is working on a book at the moment where he's thinking about what to call it, a galactic landscaping where precisely that I've got this lovely view but there's this planet in the way. And if I could just get that, oh, lovely, or whatever it might be, you know, like moving in, moving in Earth, or a habitable planet away from a sun that's about to expand and destroy it, or whatever it might be. Yeah, I am. I do think moving forward that you're going to see far more opportunities open up. I would say that technology provides us with a lot of unknown unknowns, that means the potential in future is going to be really, really hard for us to grasp. What about the chance of any life in space? Is that completely beyond the pale that something might not need a planet to exist? Maybe it could have come from a planet and now either exist in space

or it could be born in space? Is that a thing? I don't know. I mean, my guess would be that probably find getting a date hard because space is quite big and gravity is quite useful to locate you. And also, being in a solar system is useful because you've got access to a reliable energy source,

because you're typically gonna be orbiting a star. There obviously is a chance and perhaps a civilization gets propelled into space, maybe a planet, their planet gets ejected. Is there an example in the universe where a planet was happily doing its stuff and a good civilization has emerged? And suddenly the planning got

ejected from the solar system and they had to quickly adapt and there's a head enough resources to carry on for a while and it almost became like a lifeboat and they're trying to work out how to get captured by another solar system that could happen that might be pretty grim actually the further so just imagine it phone out your house if you get thrown out your solar system for bad behavior that That's it. You don't want to be there. So I don't know.

I mean, I think the gravity is useful when energy is useful. And our solar system has been a quite a nice little house. Back yard for a while. We've got the asteroid belt. We've got Mars nearby, Venus nearby. We've got obviously the planets on the outer solar system, which were the garbage collectors at the beginning, and now stabilized. And we've got this the planets on the outer service system, which were the garbage collectors at the beginning and now stabilized.

And we've got this pretty pleasant sun. And so, you know, I kind of like where we are, but I'm biased, right? I guess we all are. You're designed to like where we are. Exactly. I'm evolved to like it. Yeah.

Why do you think that chemistry doesn't seem to have captured the public's conscience or a consciousness in the same way as something like physics has? You know, I see, when I see a chemistry documentary, I go, look, let's look at that. That's chemistry documentary. And then there's swaths and swaths and swaths of stuff about space and physics and even biology, right? So I think as chemistry is hard in the middle.

So physics is so one-to-some because it's so simple, right? And it's not that simple, but there's let, so it has let physics is a low memory affair. So there's not many rules you need to basically create the stuff. Then when you get to chemistry, you have the periodic table and this, all this information and stuff going. So it's quite pig-ordy, pig-ordy. But then when you get to biology, although it's messy, you now have cells, you have variation, and you can see the genome. So I think the chemistry is kind of trapped between the simplicity of physics and the just blender of biology. And we're too busy, you know, curing cancer and...

Getting the work done. Getting the work done, I should say. Yeah, I should say that. Yeah, how? Shots, fine. Okay, so talk to me about, you mentioned earlier on viruses and you made an analogy between a human not being on earth versus a virus being basically outside of what I'm getting would be a host.

Have you considered whether, is it likely that stuff like that would also be on other planets or the types of life, would it be typical to see parasites and viruses and other things like that? I think so. I mean, I also think that perhaps the origin of life was a virus origin of life and that things really get together in the dance for so long and that would maximize the ability to explore the solutions and then cells were a relatively late comma to the machinery and the cells were just like kept stuff together. It's like, right, I'll have you, I'll have you, I'll

have you, stay together, please replicate together, run chance happenings. And I think there is reason to believe that selection will occur at that kind of level in the over the universe. And I would wonder if viruses are a universal characteristic of life. But wouldn't it be fascinating if we go to Titan or indeed we find viruses coming from the outer solar system that have completely different technology or evolved technology that we can see it's complicated. We can see it's biological, we can see it's biological wish, but we don't recognize the base pairs in the DNA and we don't recognize the protein.

That would be mind blowing. I read a blog post a while ago talking about how a lot, it was a potential answer to the Fermi paradox, talking about how a lot of life may evolve underwater. There's a lot of water out there, liquid water. One of the problems you have with liquid water is that becoming in advanced civilizations is pretty difficult because you can't smell shit. You're not smelting anything and you're not flying anywhere on an ice ship. Is that something else that you've considered about the way that life that's exclusively underwater could perhaps develop?

Probably, I mean, it might not have any version, but I think the Fermi paradox is not a paradox, it's just because Fermi's imagination wasn't big enough. And I just think the problem, yeah, I mean, you know, but so everyone is saying coming up with reasons why that stuff doesn't happen on the day at point of one. I know, so I'm pretty sure there's life everywhere in the universe,

but it's a continuum. So you start from almost non-life sand, you go up, up, up, up, up, up selection, selection, selection, selection, kind of, some autonomy at the cellular level, multicellularity, animals, intelligence, rockets. And I think that we are basically characterizing it all wrong. We shouldn't be looking for an on-off switch. We'll be saying, oh, there's more memory there than not. So there's probably the process that gives life everywhere. But can we go and talk to someone? Well, and I think the thing that reason Fermi didn't understand

is that the causal chain of events, the fact that we can talk to each other and everyone on planet Earth can kind of understand the culture is that we shared a common ancestor. And that, you know, from mathematics to singing to whatever, you know, we might, we find an alien, we might not actually know it's an alien. We might not even understand what's seeing it. The thermy paradox might just be a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, basically a polarizing filter on your eyes,

and you just can't see the evidence of life, which is why we have to build a new detection system to look for complexity first, and then ask us, and then put it on the scale. And that's one of the things that I'm doing. And then I can build a machine to make complexity and say how complex is it? And how much did I cheat?

Because I'm cheating in my lab, right? And one says, you know, I mean, my joke is like, I don't want, I'm not a creationist. I don't, sorry, I don't believe, I'm not a creationist, but I want to be one. Which is basically, I don't believe in a creationist God, but if I make the Corona nights, they are going to worship me. I'm going to make sure of it. Fantastic. I love it.

Look, Lea Cronin, ladies and gentlemen, Lee, if people want to keep up to date with the work that you're doing and your lab and all that stuff, where should they go? doing and your lab and all that stuff, where should they go? So my Twitter, at Lee Cronin, also my web page, croninlab.com, and yeah, just use that Google thing. Lee, I appreciate you. Thanks, mate. Cheers, Chris. Yeah, oh yeah