The following is a conversation with Lee Cronin, a chemist from the University of Glasgow who's one of the most fascinating, brilliant, out of the box thinking scientists have ever spoken to.

This episode was recorded more than two weeks ago. So the war in Ukraine is not mentioned. I have been spending a lot of time each day talking to people in Ukraine and Russia. I have family, friends, colleagues and loved ones in both countries.

I will try to release a solo episode on this war, but I've been failing to find the words that make sense of it, for myself and others. So I may not. I ask for your understanding no matter which path I take.

Most of my time is spent trying to help as much as I can privately. I'm talking to people who are suffering, who are angry, afraid.

When I returned to this conversation with Lee, I couldn't help but smile. He's a beautiful, brilliant and hilarious human being. He's basically a human manifestation of the mad scientist Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty.

I thought about quitting this podcast for a time, but for now at least I'll keep going. I love people too much. You the listener. I meet folks on the street or when I run. You say a few kind words about the podcast and we talk about life, the small things and the big things. All of it gives me hope.

People are just amazing. You are amazing. I ask for your support, wisdom and patience as I keep going with this silly little podcast, including through some difficult conversations.

And hopefully many fascinating and fun ones too.

This is the Lux Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Lee Cronin.

How do you think life originated on Earth and what insights does that give us about life?

If we go back to the origin of Earth and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago, planet was quite hot. There was a limited number of minerals.

There was some carbon, some water. And I think that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry that we really don't understand.

So that means you've got a finite number of elements that are going to react very simply with one another and out of that mess comes a cell. So literally sand turns into cells and it seems to happen quick.

So what I think I can say with some degree of I think not certainty but curiosity, genuine curiosity is that life happened fast.

Yeah. So when we say fast, this is a pretty surprising fact and maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate.

But it seems like most like 70 or 80% of the time that Earth has been around has been life on it, like some very significant percentage.

So when you say fast, like the slow part is from single cell or from bacteria to some more complicated organisms.

It seems like most of the time that Earth has been around, it's been single cell or like very basic organisms like a couple of billion years.

But yeah, you're right. That's really, I recently kind of revisited our history and saw this and I was just looking at the timeline.

Wait a minute, like how did life just spring up so quickly, like really quickly? That makes me think that it really wanted to like put another way.

It's very easy for life to spring.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's much more inevitable.

And I think I try to kind of not provoke but try and push chemists to think about because chemists are essential to this problem, right?

Understanding the origin of life on Earth at least because we're made of chemistry.

But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet also, the emergence of life on the planet is as common as the formation of a star.

And if you start framing it in that way, it allows you to then look at the universe slightly differently because, and we can get into this I think in quite some detail.

But I think to come back to your question, I have little idea of how life got started, but I know it was simple.

And I know that the process of selection had to occur before the biology was established so that selection built the framework from which life kind of grew in complexity and capability and functionality and autonomy.

And I think these are all really important words that we can unpack over the next while.

Can you say all the words again?

So you said selection, so natural selection, the original A B testing.

And then complexity and then the degree of autonomy and sophistication because I think that people misunderstand what life is.

Some people say that life is a cell and some people that say that life is a virus or life is a, you know, an on off switch.

I don't think it's that life is the universe developing a memory and the laws of physics and the way, well, there are no laws of physics.

Physics is just memory free stuff.

So there's only a finite number of ways you can arrange the fundamental particles to do the things.

Life is the universe developing a memory.

So it's like sewing a piece of art slowly and then you can look back at it.

So there's a stickiness to life.

It's like universe doing stuff and when you say memory, it's like there's a stickiness to a bunch of the stuff it's building together.

So like you can in a stable way trace back the complexity and that tells a coherent story.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's, by the way, very poetic and beautiful.

Life is the universe developing a memory.

Okay.

And then there's autonomy.

You said complexity we'll talk about, but it's a really interesting idea that selection preceded biology.

Yeah, I think.

So what, first of all, what is chemistry?

Like the sand still count as chemistry?

Sure.

I mean, as a chemist, the card carrying chemist, if I'm allowed a card, I don't know.

I don't know what I am most days.

What is the card made of?

What's the chemical composition of the card?

So what is chemistry?

Well, chemistry is the thing that happens when you bring electrons together and you form bonds.

So bonds, I say to people when they talk about life elsewhere and I just say, well, there's bonds, there's hope because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity.

They allow you to record those memories or at least on earth.

Or at least on earth, you could imagine, you know, a Stanislaw Lemtripe world where you might have life emerging or intelligence emerging before life.

That may be something like Solaris or something.

But, you know, to get to selection, if atoms can combine and form bonds, those bonds, those atoms can bond to different elements and those molecules will have different identities and interact with each other differently.

And then you can start to have some degree of causation or interaction and then selection and then existence.

And then you go up the kind of the path of complexity.

And so at least on earth, as we know it, there is a sufficient pool of available chemicals to start searching that combinatorial space or bonds.

So, okay, this is a really interesting question.

Let's lay it out.

So, bonds, almost like cards.

We say there's bonds, there is life, there's intelligence, there's consciousness.

And what you just made me realize is those can emerge or let's put bonds aside, those can emerge in any order.

That's really brilliant.

So, intelligence can come before life.

It's like, panpsychists believe that consciousness, I guess, comes before life and before intelligence.

So, consciousness permeates all matter.

It's some kind of fabric of reality.

So, within this framework, you can kind of arrange everything, but you need to have the bonds that precedes everything else.

Oh, and the other thing is selection.

So, the mechanism of selection, that could proceed, couldn't that proceed bonds to whatever the hell selection is?

So, I would say that there is an elegant order to it.

Bonds allow selection, allows the emergence of life, allows the emergence of multicellularity and then more information processing, building state machines all the way up.

However, you could imagine a situation if you had, I don't know, a neutron star or a sun or what, a ferromagnetic loops interacting with one another.

And these oscillators building state machines and these state machines reading something out in the environment.

Over time, these state machines would be able to literally record what happened in the past and sense what's going on in the present and imagine the future.

However, I don't think it's ever going to be within a human comprehension, that type of life.

I wouldn't count it out because, you know, whenever you, I know in science, whenever I say something's impossible, I then wake up the next day and say, you know, that's actually wrong.

I mean, there are some limits, of course.

I don't see myself traveling fast and light anytime soon.

Eric Weinstein says that's possible, so he will say you're wrong.

Sure, but I'm an experimentalist as well.

So one of my, I have two superpowers.

My stupidity, and I don't mean that as a, you know, I'm like absolutely completely witness, but I mean my ability to kind of just start again and ask the question and then do it with an experiment.

I always wanted to be a theoretician growing up, but I just didn't have the, just didn't have the intellectual capability, but I was able to think of experiments in my head.

I could then do in my lab or in the, you know, when I was a child outside and then those experiments in my head and then outside reinforced one another.

So I think that's a very good way of kind of grounding the science, right?

Well, that's the nice way to think about theoreticians is they're just people who run experiments in their head.

I mean, that's exactly what Einstein did, right?

But you're also capable of doing that in the head, in your head, inside your head and in the real world and the connection between the two.

The connection between the two is when you first discovered your superpower stupidity.

I like it.

Okay.

What's the second superpower?

Your accent?

Or is that?

Well, I don't know.

I am genuinely curious.

So I have a, you know, like everybody, ego problems, but my curiosity is bigger than my ego.

So as long as that happens, I can, I can.

That's awesome.

That is so powerful.

You're just dropping some powerful lines of curiosity is bigger than ego.

That's something I have to think about because you always struggle about the role of ego in life.

And that's, that's so nice to think about.

Don't think about the size of ego, the absolute size of ego.

Think about the relative size of ego to the other, the other horses pulling at you.

And if the curiosity one is bigger than ego will do just fine and make you fun to talk to.

Anyway, so those are the two superpowers.

How do those connect to natural selection or selection and bonds?

And I forgot already life and consciousness.

So we're going back to selection in the universe and origin of life on earth.

I mean, selection is a, I'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe.

So not mean not a fundamental force, but a, but a directing, but it is a directing force because existence, although existence appears to be the default, the existence of what?

Why does, we can get to this later, I think, but it's amazing that, that discrete things exist.

And, you know, you see this cup, it's not the, you know, sexiest cup in the world, but it's pretty functional.

This cup, the complexity of this cup isn't just in the object.

It is literally the lineage of people making cups and recognizing that, seeing that in their head, making an abstraction of a cup and then making a different one.

So I wonder how many billions of cups have, you know, come before this one.

And that's a process of selection and existence.

And the only reason the cup is still uses quite useful like the handle, you know, it's convenient so I don't die and keep hydration.

And so I think we are missing something fundamental in the universe about selection.

And I think what biology is, is a, is a selection amplifier.

And that the, this is where autonomy comes in.

And actually I think that how humanity is going to humans and, and autonomous robots or whatever we're going to call them in the future, we'll, we'll supercharge that even further.

So selection is happening in the universe.

But if you look in the asteroid belt selection, if objects are being kicked in and out the asteroid belt, those trajectories are quite complex.

You don't really look at that as productive selection because it's not doing anything to improve its function.

But is it the asteroid belt has existed for some time.

So there is some selection going on, but the functionalities is somewhat limited on earth at the formation of earth.

Interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment gave selection and then things could happen.

Because you could think about in chemistry, we can have an infinite number of reactions happen, but they don't all have, all the reactions are allowed to happen, don't happen.

Why? Because they're energy barriers.

So there must be some things called catalysts out there or there are bits of minerals that when two molecules get together on that mineral, it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction.

And so the reaction is promoted.

So suddenly you get one reaction over another series of possibilities occurring that makes a particular molecule.

And this keeps happening in steps.

And before you know it, these almost these waves as discrete reactions work together and you start to build a machinery that is run by existence.

So as you go forward in time, the fact of the molecules, the bonds are getting, there are more bonds in a molecule, there's more function, there's more capability for this molecule to interact with other molecules to redirect them.

It's like a series of little, and I don't want to use this term too much, but it's almost thinking about the simplest von Neumann constructor.

That's the simplest molecule that could build a more complicated molecule to build a more complicated molecule.

And before you know it, when that more complicated molecule can act on the causal chain that's produced itself and change it, suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy.

And that's where life I think emerges in earnest.

Every single word in the past few paragraphs, let's break those apart. Who's von Neumann, what's the constructor, the closing of the loop that you're talking about, the molecule that starts becoming, I think you said like the smallest von Neumann constructor, the smallest, the minimal.

So what do all those things mean and what are we supposed to imagine when we think about the smallest von Neumann constructor?

So John von Neumann is a real hero, actually, not just me, but many people, I think, computer science and physics. He was an incredible intellect who probably solved a lot of the problems that we're working on today and just forgot to write them down.

And I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny as I think his friends called him, but I think he was Hungarian mathematician, came to the US.

And basically he was involved in the Manhattan Project and developing computation and came up with all sorts of ideas and I think it was one of the first people to come up with cellular automata.

Really? I didn't know this little fact.

I think so.

Well, anyway, if he didn't come up with it, he probably did come up with it and didn't write it down.

There was a couple of people did at the same time and then Conway obviously took it on and then Wolfram loves CAs, there is his fabric of the universe.

And what I think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied and this may be incorrect recollection, so a lot of what I say is going to be kind of just way out of my...

You're just part of the universe creating its memory, designing...

Exactly, rewriting history.

Exactly, imperfectly.

But what I mean is I think he liked this idea of thinking about how could a Turing machine literally build itself without a Turing machine, right?

It's like literally how did state machines emerge?

And I think that von Neumann constructors, he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing, autonomous, that could build itself.

And what would those rules look like in the world?

And that's what a von Neumann kind of constructor looked like.

Like it's a minimal hypothetical object that could build itself, self replicate.

And I'm really fascinated by that because I think that although it's probably not exactly what happened, it's a nice model because as chemists, if we could go back to the origin of life and think about what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly?

So like with no prime mover, with no architect, it assembles through just existence.

So random stuff bumping in together and you make this first molecule.

So you have molecule A and molecule A interacts with another random molecule B and they get together and they realize by working together they can make more of themselves.

But then they realize they can mutate so they can make AB prime.

So AB prime is different to AB and then AB prime can then act back where A and B are being created and slightly nudge that causal chain and make AB prime more evolvable or learn more.

So that's the closing the loop part.

Closing the loop part.

It feels like the mutation part is not that difficult.

It feels like the difficult part is just creating a copy of yourself at step one.

That seems like one of the greatest inventions in the history of the universe is the first molecule that figured out, holy shit, I can create a copy of myself.

How hard is that?

I think it's really, really easy.

Okay, I did not expect that.

I think it's really, really easy.

Well, let's take a step back.

I think replicating molecules are rare.

But if you say, you know, I think I was saying on, I probably got into trouble on Twitter though.

There's about more than 18 mils of water in there.

So one mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules.

That's about the number of stars in the universe, I think of the order.

So there's three universe worth.

Somebody corrected you on Twitter.

I'm always being corrected.

But there's a lot of molecules in the water.

So although it's for you and me really hard to conceive of, if existence is not the default for a long period of time, because what happens is the molecules get degraded.

So much of the possibilities in the universe are just broken back into atoms.

So you have this kind of destruction of the molecules for our chemical reactions.

So you only need one or two molecules to become good at copying themselves for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool and start to grow.

And so then replication actually over time, when you have bonds, I think is much simpler and much easier.

And I even found this in my lab years ago.

I had one of the reasons I started doing inorganic chemistry and making rust, making a bit of rust based on a thing called molybdenum.

Molybdenum oxide is this molybdenum oxide, very simple.

But when you add acid to it and some electrons, they make these molecules, you just cannot possibly imagine would be constructed big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel.

Or I cost a dodecahedron 132 molybdenum atoms all in the same pot.

And I realized when I, and I just finished experiments two years ago, I've just published a couple of papers on this.

That there actually, there is a random small molecule with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly, but it happens to template its own production.

And then by chance, it templates the ring, just an accident, just like just an absolute accident.

And that ring also helps make the small 12 mer.

And so you have what's called an auto catalytic set where A makes B and B helps make A and vice versa, and you then make this loop.

So it's a bit like these, they all work in synergy to make this chain of events that grow.

And it doesn't take a very sophisticated model to show that if you have these objects are competing and then collaborating to help one another build, they just grow out of the mess.

And although they seem improbable, they are improbable.

In fact, impossible in one step.

There's multiple steps.

This is when the blind people look at the blind watchmaker argument and talk about how could a watch something spontaneously emerge.

Well, it doesn't.

It's a lineage of watches and cruder devices that are bootstrapped onto one another.

Right.

So it's very improbable, but once you get that little discovery, like with the wheel and fire, it just explodes in, because it's so successful, it explodes.

This is basically selection. So this templating mechanism that allows you to have a little blueprint for yourself, how you go through different procedures to build copies of yourself.

So in chemistry somehow, it's possible to imagine that that kind of thing is easy to spring up in more complex organisms. It feels like a different thing and much more complicated.

We're having multiple abstractions of the birds and the bees conversation here.

But with human, sorry, with complex organisms, it feels like difficult to have reproduction to...

That's going to get clipped out. I'm going to make fun of that.

It's difficult to develop this idea of making copies of yourself or no, because that seems like a magical idea for life to...

Wow. That feels like very necessary for what selection is, for what evolution is, but then if selection precedes all of this, then maybe these are just like echoes of the selecting mechanism at different scales.

Yeah, that's exactly it. So selection is the default in the universe, if you want to.

And what happens is that life, the solution that life has got on Earth, life on Earth, biology on Earth, is unique to Earth.

We can talk about that. And that was really hard fought for, but that is a solution that works on Earth, the ribosome, the fundamental machine that is responsible for every cell on Earth,

of wherever it is in the thick kingdom of life. That is an incredibly complex object, but it was evolved over time and it wasn't involved in a vacuum.

And I think that once we understand that selection can occur without the ribosome, but what the ribosome does, it's a phase transition in replication.

And I think that that and also technology that is probably much easier to get to than we think.

Why do you put the ribosome as the central part of living organisms on Earth?

It basically is a combination of two different polymer systems, so RNA and peptides.

So the RNA world, if you like, gets transmitted and builds proteins and the proteins are responsible for all the catalysis, the majority of the catalysis goes on the cell.

No ribosome, no proteins, no decoding, no evolution.

So the ribosome is looking at the action. You don't put like the RNA itself as the critical thing, like information, you put action as the most important thing.

Yeah, I think the actual molecules that we have in biology right now entirely contingent on the history of life on Earth, there are so many possible solutions.

And this is where chemistry gets itself into, origin of life chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap.

Yeah, let me interrupt you there. You've tweeted, you're going to get, I'm going to set your tweets like it's Shakespeare.

Okay. It's surprising you haven't gotten canceled on Twitter yet. Your brilliance once again saves you.

I'm just kidding. You like to have a little bit of fun on Twitter.

You've tweeted that quote, origin of life research is a scam.

So if this is Shakespeare, can we analyze this word? Why is the origin of life research a scam? Aren't you kind of doing origin of life research?

Okay, it was tongue in cheek, but yeah, I think, and I meant it as tongue in cheek. I'm not doing the origin of life research. I'm trying to make artificial life.

I also want to bound the likelihood of the origin of life on Earth, but more importantly, to find origin of life elsewhere.

But let me directly address the tweet. There are many, many good chemists out there doing origin of life research, but I want to nudge them.

And I think they're brilliant. There's no question. The chemistry they are doing, their motivation is great.

So what I meant by that tweet is saying that maybe they're making assumptions about saying if only I could make this particular type of molecule, say this RNA molecule or this phosphodiester or this other molecule,

it's going to somehow unlock the origin of life. And I think that origin of life has been looking at this for a very long time.

And whilst I think it's brilliant to work out how you can get to those molecules, I think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life could be nudged into doing something even more profound.

And so the argument I'm making, it's a bit like right now, let's say, I don't know, the first Tesla that makes its way to, I don't know, into a new country in the world.

Let's say there's a country X that has never had a Tesla before and they get the Tesla.

And what they do is they take the Tesla apart and say, we want to find the origin of cars in the universe and say, okay, how did this form?

And how did this form? And they just randomly keep making till they make the door, they make the wheel, they make the steering column and all this stuff.

And they say, oh, that's the root. That's the way cars emerge on Earth.

But actually, we know that there's a causal chain of cars going right back to Henry Ford and the horse and carriage.

And before that, maybe, you know, people were using wheels.

And I think that obsession with the identities that we see in biology right now are giving us a false sense of security about what we're looking for.

And I think the origin of life chemistry is in danger of not making the progress that it deserves because the chemists are doing this.

The field is exploding right now.

There's amazing people out there, young and old doing this.

And there's deservedly so more money going in.

You know, I used to complain, there's more money being spent searching for the Higgs boson that we know exists in the origin of life.

You know, why is that?

We understand the origin of life.

We're going to actually work out what life is.

We're going to be at a bound, the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

And most important for us, we are going to know or have a good idea what the future of humanity looks like.

You know, we need to understand that although we're precious, we're not the only life forms in the universe.

Well, that's my very strong impression.

I have no data for that.

It's just right now a belief.

And I want to turn that belief into a more than a belief by experimentation.

But coming back to the scam, the scam is if we just make this RNA, we've got this, you know, this fluke event, we know how that's simple.

Let's make this phosphodiester or let's make ATP or ATP, we've got that part nailed.

Let's now make this other molecule, another molecule.

And how many molecules are going to be enough?

And then the reason I say this is when you go back to Craig Venter, when he invented his life form, Cyndia, this micro, this minimal plasmid, is a myoplasma, something I don't know the name of it.

But he made this wonderful cell and said, I've invented life.

Not quite.

He facsimilied the genome from this entity and made it in the lab or the DNA, but he didn't make the cell.

He had to take an existing cell that has a causal chain going all the way back to Luca.

And he showed when he took out the gene, the genes and put in his genes, synthesized, the cell could boot up.

But it's remarkable that he could not make a cell from scratch.

And even now today, synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch because there's some contingent information embodied outside the genome in the cell.

And that is just incredible.

So there's lots of layers to the scam.

Well, let me then ask the question, how can we create life in a lab from scratch?

What have been the most promising attempts at creating life in the lab from scratch?

Has anyone actually been able to do it?

Do you think anyone will be able to do it in the near future if they haven't already?

Yeah, I think that nobody has made life in the lab from scratch.

Lots of people would argue that they have made progress.

I think the synthesis of a synthetic genome milestone in human achievement, brilliant.

Can we just walk back and say, what would you say from your perspective, one of the world experts in exactly this area, what does it mean to create life from scratch?

Or if you sit back, whether you do it or somebody else does it, it's like, damn, this is, we just created life.

Well, I can tell you what I would expect, I would like to be able to do is to go from sand to cells in my lab.

Can you explain what sand is?

Just inorganic stuff.

Like basically just so sand, it's just silicon oxide with some other ions in it, maybe some inorganic carbon, some carbonates.

Just basically clearly dead stuff that you could just grind rocks into sand.

And it would be what, in a kind of vacuum, so they could remove anything else that could possibly be like a shadow of life that can assist in the chemical.

You could do that.

You could insist and say, look, I'm going to take, not just inorganic, I want some more, I want to cheat and have some organic, but I want inorganic organic.

And I'll explain the play on words in a moment.

So I would like to basically put into a world, say a completely, you know, a synthetic world, if you like, a closed world, put some inorganic materials and just literally add some energy in some form, be it lightning or heat, UV light, and run this thing in cycles.

Over time, and let it solve the search problem.

So I see the origin of life as a search problem in chemical space.

And then I would wait, literally wait for a life form to crawl out of the test tube.

That's a joke I tell my group.

Literally wait for a very, don't worry, it's going to be very feeble.

It's not going to take over the world.

You know, there's ways of ethically containing it.

Famous last words.

Indeed, indeed, indeed.

You know, this is being recorded, right?

It will not make you look good once it crawls out of the lab and destroys all human civilization.

But there is a very good things you can do to prevent that.

For instance, if you put stuff in your world, which isn't earth abundant, so let's say we make life based on molybdenum and it escapes, it would die immediately because there's not enough molybdenum in the environment.

So we can do responsible life or as I fantasize with my research group on our away day that would go in, I think it's actually morally, if we don't find, until humanity finds life in the universe, this is going on the tangent, it's our moral obligation to make origin of life bombs, identify dead planets and bomb them with our origin of life machines and make them alive.

I think it is our moral obligation to do that.

Some people might argue with me about that, but I think that we need more life in the universe.

And then we kind of forget we did it and then come back.

So where did you come from?

But coming back to what I'd expect.

Father, are you back?

I think this is once again a Rick and Morty episode.

Definitely all Rick and Morty all the way down.

So I imagine we have this pristine experiment and everything is sanitized and we put in inorganic materials and we have cycles, whether they're night cycles, up, down, whatever, and we look for evidence of replication and evolution over time.

And that's what the experiment should be.

Now, are there people doing this in the world right now?

There are a couple of, there's some really good groups doing this.

There's some really interesting scientists doing this around the world.

They're kind of perhaps too much associated with the scam and so they're using molecules that are already invented by biology.

So there's a bit of replication built in, but I still think the work they're doing is amazing.

But I would like people to be a bit freer and say, let's just basically shake a load of sand in a box and wait for life to come out because that's what happened on Earth.

And so that we have to understand that.

Now, how would I know I've been successful?

Well, because I'm not obsessing with what molecules are in life now, I would wager a vast quantity of money.

I'm not very rich, so just be a few dollars, but for me, the solution space will be different.

So the genetic material will be not RNA.

The proteins will not be what we think.

The solutions will be just completely different and it might be very feeble because that's the other thing we should be able to show fairly robustly that even if I did make or someone did make a new life form in the lab, it would be so poor that it's not going to leap out.

It is the fear about making a lethal life form in a lab from scratch is similar to us imagining that we're going to make the terminator at Boston Dynamics tomorrow.

And the problem is we don't communicate that properly.

I know you explain this very well.

There is not the AI catastrophic coming.

We're very far away from that.

That doesn't mean we should ignore it.

Same with the origin of life catastrophic, it's not coming anytime soon.

We should ignore it, but we shouldn't let that fear stop us from doing those experiments.

But this is a much, much longer discussion because there's a lot of details there.

I would say there is potential for catastrophic events to happen in much dumber ways.

In AI space, there's a lot of ways to create social networks that are creating a kind of accelerated set of events that we might not be able to control.

The social network, the virality in the digital space can create mass movements of ideas that can then, if times are tough, create military conflict and all those kinds of things.

But that's not super intelligent AI that's an interesting at scale application of AI.

If you look at viruses, viruses are pretty dumb, but at scale, their application is pretty detrimental.

Origin of life, much like all of the kind of virology, the very contentious word of gain of function research and virology, research on viruses, messing with them genetically, that can create a lot of problems if not done well.

So we have to be very cautious. So there's a kind of whenever you're ultra cautious about stuff in AI or in virology and biology, it borders on cynicism, I would say, where it's like everything we do is going to turn out to be destructive and terrible.

So I'm just going to sit here and do nothing. Okay, that's a possible solution except for the fact that somebody's going to do it.

It's science and technology progresses. So we have to do it in an ethical way in a good way, considering in a transparent way in an open way, considering all the possible positive trajectories that could be taken and making sure as much as possible that we walk those trajectories.

So yeah, I don't think Terminator is coming, but a totally unexpected version of Terminator maybe around the corner.

Yeah, it might be here already. Yeah. So I agree with that. And so going back to the origin of life discussion, I think that in synthetic biology right now, we have to be very careful about how we edit genomes and edit synthetic biology to do things.

So that's kind of, that's where things might go wrong in the same way as, you know, Twitter turning ourselves into kind of strange scale effects.

I would love origin of life research or artificial life research to get to the point where we have those worries.

Because that's why I think we're just so far away from that. We are just, you know, right now, I think there are two really important angles.

There is the origin of life people, researchers who are faithfully working on this and trying to make those molecules, the scam molecules I talked about.

And then there are people on the creationist side is saying, look, the fact you can't make these molecules and you can't make a cell means that evolution isn't true and all this other stuff.

Gotcha. Yeah. And so, and I find that really frustrating because actually the origin of life researchers are all working in good faith, right?

Yes. And so what I'm trying to do is give origin of life research a little bit more of an open context.

And one of the things I think is important, I really want to make a new life form in my lifetime.

I really want to prove that life is a general phenomena, a bit like gravity in the universe, because I think that's going to be really important for humanities, global psychological state, meaning going forward.

That's beautifully put. So one, it will help us understand ourselves. So that's useful for science. But two, it gives us a kind of hope, if not an awe at all the huge amounts of alien civilizations that are out there.

If you can build life and understand just how easy it is to build life, then that's just as good, if not much better than discovering life on another planet.

Yeah. It's, I mean, it's cheaper. It's much cheaper and much easier and probably much more conclusive because once you're able to create life, like you said, it's a search problem that there's probably a lot of different ways to do it.

So once you create the, once you find the first solution, you probably have all the right methodology for finding all kinds of other solutions.

Yeah. And wouldn't it be great if we could find a solution? I mean, it's probably a bit late for, I mean, I worry about climate change, but I'm not that worried about climate change.

And I think one day you could think about, could we engineer a new type of life form that could basically, and I don't want to do this.

So I don't think we should do this necessarily, but it's a good thought experiment that would perhaps take CO2 out of the atmosphere or an intermediate life form.

So it's not quite alive. It's almost like an add on that we can, with a time dependent add on, you could give to say cyanobacteria in the ocean or to maybe to wheat.

So right, we're just going to fix a bit more CO2 and we're going to work out how much we need to fix to basically save the climate.

And we're going to use evolutionary principles to basically get there.

What worries me is that biology has had a few billion years to find a solution for CO2 fixation, hasn't really done.

It's not, the solution isn't brilliant for our needs, but biology wasn't thinking about our needs. Biology was thinking about biology's needs.

But I think if we can do, as you say, make life in the lab, then suddenly we don't need to go to everywhere and conclusively prove it.

I think we make life in the lab. We look at the extent of life in the solar system.

How far did Earth life get? Probably world martians, probably life got going on Mars, the chemistry on Mars, seeded Earth.

That might have been a legitimate way to kind of truncate the surface.

But in the outer solar system, we might have completely different life forms on Enceladus, on Europa and Titan.

And that would be a cool thing because...

Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Did you just say that you think, in terms of likelihood, life started on Mars, statistically speaking, life started on Mars and seeded Earth?

It could be possible because Mars was habitable for the type of life that we have right now, type of chemistry before Earth.

So it seems to me that Mars got searching doing chemistry.

It started way before.

Yeah, and so they had a few more replicators and some other stuff, and if those replicators got ejected from Mars and landed on Earth,

and Earth would be like, I don't need to start again.

Thanks for that, and then it just carries on.

So I think we will find evidence of life on Mars, either life we put there by mistake, contamination, or actually life, the earliest remnants of life.

And that would be really exciting. It's a really good reason to go there.

But I think it's more unlikely because of the gravitational situation in the solar system if we find life in the outer solar system.

Titan and all that, that would be its own thing.

Wow, that would be so cool.

If we go to Mars and we find life that looks a hell of a lot similar to Earth life,

and then we go to Titan and all those weird moons with the ices and the volcanoes and all that kind of stuff,

and then we find there something that looks, I don't know, way weirder.

Some other, some non RNA type of situation.

Almost life, like in the prebiotic chemical space.

And I think there are four types of exoplanets we can go look for, right?

Because when JWST goes up and touch wood, it goes up and everything's fine.

When we look at a star, statistically, most stars have planets around them.

What type of planet are they? Are they going to be dead?

Are they going to be just a prebiotic origin of life coming?

So are they going to be technological?

Are they going to be technological? So we have intelligence on them.

And will they have died?

So, you know, from, you know, had life on them.

Those are the four states of the world.

And so, and suddenly it's a bit like I want to classify planets the way we classify stars.

Yeah.

And I think that in terms of rather than having this, oh, we've found, we found methane.

There's evidence of life. We found oxygen. That's the evidence of life.

We found whatever molecule marker and start to then frame things a little bit more.

As those four states, which by the way, you're just saying four, but there could be if

before the dead, there could be other states that we humans can even conceive of.

Yeah, just prebiotic, almost alive, you know, got the possibility to come alive.

I think.

But there could be a post technological, like whatever we think of as technology,

that could be like pre conscious, like where we all meld into one super intelligent

conscious or some weird thing that naturally happens over time.

Yeah, I mean, I think that all bets.

The metaverse.

We join into a virtual metaverse and start creating, which is kind of an interesting idea,

almost arbitrary number of copies of each other much more quickly to what can mess with different ideas in mind.

Like I can create a thousand copies of Lex, like every possible version of Lex.

And then just see like, and then I just have them like argue with each other and like until,

like in the space of ideas and see who wins out.

How could that possibly go wrong?

But anyway, but there's, especially in this digital space where you could start exploring with AI's mix,

then you could start engineering arbitrary intelligences.

You can start playing in the space of ideas, which might move us into a world that looks very different than a biological world.

Our current world, the technology is still very much tied to our biology.

We might move past that completely.

We definitely will.

Definitely, because that could be another phase then.

But I did say technological, so I think I agree with you.

Let's get this right.

Dead world, no prospect of life.

Prebiotic world, life emerging, living and technological.

And the dead one, you probably won't be able to tell between the dead never been alive and the dead one,

maybe lots of artifacts and maybe there's five.

There's probably not more than five.

And I think the technological one could have life on it still, but it might just have exceeded.

Because one way that life might survive on Earth is if we can work out how to deal with the real climate change that comes when the sun expands.

It might be a way to survive that.

But yeah, I think that we need to start thinking statistically when it comes to looking for life in the universe.

Let me ask you then sort of statistically how many alien civilizations are out there in those four phases that you're talking about.

When you look up the stars and you're sipping on some wine and talking to other people with British accents about something intelligent and intellectual, I'm sure.

Do you think there's a lot of alien civilizations looking back at us and wondering the same?

My romantic view of the universe is really taking loans from my logical self.

So what I'm saying is I have no idea.

But having said that, there is no reason to suppose that life is as hard as we first thought it was.

And so if we just take Earth as a marker, and if I think that life is a much more general phenomena than just our biology, then I think the universe is full of life.

And the reason for the Fermi paradox is not that they're not out there.

It's just that we can't interact with the other life forms because they're so different.

And I'm not saying that they're necessarily like, hasn't depicted in a rival or other.

I'm just saying that perhaps there are very few universal facts in the universe.

And maybe our technologies are quite divergent.

And so I think that it's very hard to know how we're going to interact with alien life.

You think there's a lot of kinds of life that's possible. I guess that was the intuition.

You provided that the way biology itself, but even this particular kind of biology that we have on Earth, is something that is just one sample of nearly infinite number of other possible complex autonomous self replicating type of things that could be possible.

And so we're almost unable to see the alternative versions of us.

I mean, we'll still be able to detect them. We'll still be able to interact with them.

We'll still be able to, what exactly is lost in translation? Why can't we see them? Why can't we talk to them?

Because I too have a sense, you put it way more poetically, but it seems both statistically and sort of romantically, it feels like the universe should be teaming with life, like super intelligent life.

And I just, I sit there and the Fermi paradox is felt very distinctly by me when I look up at the stars, because it's the same way I feel when I'm driving through New Jersey and listening to Bruce Springsteen and feel quite sad.

It's like Lucy K talks about pulling off to the side of the road and just weeping a little bit. I'm almost like wondering like, hey, why, why aren't you talking to us?

You know, it feels lonely. It feels lonely because it feels like they're out there.

I think that there are a number of answers to that. I think the Fermi paradox is perhaps based on the assumption that if life did emerge in the universe, it would be similar to our life and there's only one solution.

And I think that what we've got to start to do is go out and look for selection detection rather than an evolution detection rather than life detection.

And I think that once we start to do that, we might start to see really interesting things. And we haven't been doing this for very long.

And we are living in an expanding universe and that makes the problem a little bit harder.

Everybody's always leaving.

Distance wise.

I'm very optimistic that we will, well, I don't know, there are two movies that came out within six months of one another.

Ad Astra and Cosmos. Ad Astra, the very expensive blockbuster with Brad Pitt in it and saying there is no life.

Life on Earth has more pressures than Cosmos, which is a UK production which basically aliens came and visited Earth one day and they were discovered in the UK.

It was quite, it's a fun film.

But I really loved those two films and at the same time, at the time those films were coming out, I was working on a paper, a life detection paper and it was so hard to publish this paper.

And it was almost as, I got so depressed trying to get this science out there that I felt the depression of the film in Ad Astra like life, there's no life elsewhere in the universe.

But I'm incredibly optimistic that I think we will find life in the universe, firm evidence of life and it will have to start on Earth, making life on Earth and surprising us.

We have to surprise ourselves and make non biological life on Earth.

And then people say, well, you made this life on Earth, therefore, you're part of the causal chain of that and that might be true.

But if I can show how I'm able to do it with very little cheating or very little information inputs, just creating like a model planet, some description and watching life emerge, then I think that we will be even to persuade even the hardest critic that it's possible.

Now, with regards to the Fermi paradox, I think that we might crush that with the JWST.

It's basically, if I recall correctly, the mirror is about 10 times the size of the Hubble, that we're going to be able to do spectroscopy, look at colors of exoplanets, I think, not brilliantly, but we'll be able to start to classify them.

And we'll start to get a real fit feel for what's going on in the universe on these exoplanets because it's only in the last few decades, I think, maybe even last decade that we even came to recognize that exoplanets even are common.

And I think that that gives us a lot of optimism that life is going to be out there. But I think we have to start framing, we have to start preparing the fact that biology is only one solution.

I can tell you with confidence that biology on Earth does not exist anywhere else in the universe. We are absolutely unique.

Well, okay, I love the confidence, but where does that confidence come from? Chemistry, how many options does chemistry really have?

Many, that's the point. And the thing is, this is where the origin of life scam comes in, is that people don't count the numbers.

So if biology, as you find on Earth, is common everywhere, then there's something really weird going on that basically written in the quantum mechanics, there's some kind of these bonds must form over these bonds and this catalyst must form over this catalyst when they're all quite equal.

Life is contingent. The origin of life on Earth was contingent upon the chemistry available at the origin of life on Earth.

So that means if we want to find other lifelike worlds, we look for the same kind of rocky world, we might look in the same zone as Earth and we might expect reasonably to find biological like stuff going on.

That would be a reasonable hypothesis, but it won't be the same. It can't be. It's like saying, I don't believe in magic. That's why I'm sure.

I just don't believe in magic. I believe in statistics and I can do experiments. And so I won't get the same, exactly the same sequence of events. I'll get something different.

And so there is TikTok elsewhere in the universe, but it's not the same as our TikTok, right? That's what I mean.

Which aspect of it is not the same?

Well, I just think, so what is TikTok? TikTok is a social media where people upload videos, right? Silly videos.

So I guess there might be... Well, there's humor, there's attention, there's ability to process, there's ability for intelligent organisms to collaborate on ideas and find humor and ideas and play with those ideas, make them viral memes.

Humor seems to be kind of fundamental to the human experience.

And I think that that's a really interesting question we can ask. Is humor a fundamental thing in the universe? I think maybe it will be, right?

In terms of you think about in a game theoretic sense, humor, the emergence of humor serves a role in our game engine. And so if selection is fundamental in the universe, so is humor.

Well, I actually don't know exactly what role humor serves. Maybe it's from a chemical perspective. It's like a catalyst for...

I guess it's of several purposes. One is the catalyst for spreading ideas on the internet. That's modern humor.

But humor is also a good way to deal with the difficulty of life. It's a kind of valve, release valve for suffering.

Throughout human history, life has been really hard. And for the people that I've known in my life who've lived through some really difficult things, humor is part of how they deal with that.

It's usually dark humor. But yeah, it's interesting. I don't know exactly what's the more mathematically general way to formulate what the hell is humor?

What humor does it serve? But I still... We're kind of joking here, but it's a counterintuitive idea to me to think that life elsewhere in the universe

is very different than life on Earth. And also, each instantiation of life is likely very different from each other.

Maybe there's a few clusters of similar life, but it's much more likely, to me, it's kind of a novel thought. I'm not sure what to do with it.

But you're saying that it's more common to be a weird outcast in the full spectrum of life than it is to be in some usual cluster.

So every instantiation of a kind of chemistry that results in complexity, that's autonomous and self replicating, however the hell you define life, that is going to be very different every time.

I don't know. It feels like a selection is a fundamental kind of directed force in the universe. Won't selection result in a few pockets of interesting complexities?

Yeah, if we ran Earth over again, over and over and over, you're saying it's going to come up, but there's not going to be elephants every time?

Yeah, I don't think so. I think that there will be similarities. And I think we don't know enough about how selection globally works.

But it might be that the emergence of elephants was wired into the history of Earth in some way, like the gravitational force, how evolution was going, the Cambrian explosions, blah, blah, blah, the emergence of mammals.

But I just don't know enough about the contingency, the variability. All I do know is you count the number of bits of information required to make an elephant and think about the causal chain that provides the lineage of elephants going all the way back to Luca.

There's a huge scope for divergence.

Yeah, but just like you said, with chemistry and selection, the things that result in self replicating chemistry and self replicating organisms, those are extremely unlikely, as you're saying.

But once they're successful, they multiply. So it might be a tiny subset of all things that are possible in the universe, chemically speaking, it might be a very tiny subset is actually successful at creating elephants, or elephant like, or slash human like creatures.

Well, there's two different questions. The first one, if we were to reset Earth and to start again.

At the different phases, sorry to keep interrupting.

Yeah, no, if we restart Earth and start again, say we could go back to the beginning and do the experiment or have a number of Earths, how similar would biology be? I would say that there would be broad similarities.

But the emergence of mammals is not a given unless we're going to throw an asteroid at each planet each time and try and faithfully reproduce what happened.

Then there's the other thing about when you go to another Earth like planet elsewhere, maybe there's a different ratio, particular elements, maybe there's the bombardment at the beginning of the planet was quicker or longer than Earth.

And I just don't have enough information that what I do know is that the complexity of the story of life on Earth gives us lots of scope for variation.

And I just don't think it's a reasonable mathematical assumption to think that the life on Earth that happened again would be same as what we have now.

Okay.

But you've also extended that to say that we might, as an explanation for the Fermi paradox, that that means we're not able to interact with them.

Or that's an explanation for why we haven't at scale heard from aliens is they're different than us.

We've only been looking for say 70, 80 years.

So I think that with the reason we have not found aliens yet is that we haven't worked out what life is.

No, but the aliens have worked that out surely.

I mean, statistically speaking, there must be a large number of aliens that are way ahead of us on this whole life question.

Unless there's something about this stage of intellectual evolution that often quickly results in nuclear war and destroys itself.

There's something in this process that eventually, I don't know, crystallizes the complexity and it stops, either dies or stops developing.

But most likely they already figured it out and why aren't they contacting us as some grad student somewhere wants to study a new green planet?

Maybe they have.

I mean, I don't have a coherent answer to your question other than to say that if there are other aliens out there and they're far more advanced, they might be in contact with each other.

And they might also, we might be at a point where what I'm saying quite critically is it takes two to talk, right?

So the aliens might be there, but if we don't have the ability to recognize them and talk to them, then the aliens aren't going to want to talk to us.

And I think that's a critical point and probably if that's a filter, there needs to be an ability for one to communicate with the other.

And we need to know what life is before we do that.

So we haven't qualified to even join the club to have a talk.

Well, I think they still want to teach us how to talk, right?

But my worry is that, or I think they would want to teach us how to talk like you do when you meet it.

I was going to say child, but that's a human species and you want to try to communicate with them through whatever devices you can, given what an ant is like.

I worry mostly about that humans are just too close minded or don't have the right tools.

I'm going to push back on this quite significantly. I would say because we don't understand what life is and because we don't understand how life emerged in the universe.

We don't understand the physics that gave rise to life yet.

Fundamental description, I'm way out of my pay grade, even further out.

But I'll say it anyway, because I think it's fun.

You don't get paid much anyway, as you said earlier.

So I would say that because we don't understand the universe yet, we do not understand how the universe spat out life.

And we don't know what life is.

And I think that until we understand that, it is going to limit our ability to even we don't qualify to talk to the aliens.

So I'm going to say that they might be there, but I'm not going to say that I believe in interdimensional aliens being present.

Yeah, but I think you're just being self critical, like we don't qualify.

I think the fact that we don't qualify qualifies us.

We're interesting in our innocence.

No, I'm saying that because we don't understand causal chains and the way that information is propagated in the universe.

And we don't understand what replication is yet and we don't understand how life emerged.

I think that we would not recognize aliens.

And if someone doesn't recognize you, you wouldn't go and talk to it. You don't go and talk to ants.

You don't go and talk to birds or maybe some birds you do, right? Because you can.

There's just enough cognition.

So I'm saying because we don't have enough cognitive, our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be.

We probably haven't been communicating with them.

So you don't agree with the dating strategy of playing hard to get?

Because us humans, that seems to attract us.

We're in a species that's fine, but I think we don't actually have abstraction.

No, actually, I think in this talk, in this conversation, you've helped me crystallize something that I think has been troubling me for a long time with the thermi paradox.

I'm pretty sure that a reasonable avenue is to say that you would not go and talk to your cat about calculus, right?

But I was so petty.

Sure, but I'm not talking about petting a cat.

The analogy is that the aliens are not going to talk to us because we, and I'm using calculus as an analogy for abstraction.

Because we lack the layer, the fundamental layer of understanding what life is and what the universe is in our reality.

It would be so counterproductive interacting with intelligent alien species that it would cause more angst for human race.

But they don't care.

Okay, they got to be self interested.

So they'll probably, they more care about, is it interesting for them?

Maybe they, I mean, surely there's a way to pet the cat in this analogy.

Because even if we lack complete understanding, it must be a very frustrating experience for other kinds of intelligences to communicate with us.

Still, there must be a way to interact with us.

Well, like perturb the system in interesting ways to see what these creatures do.

We might actually find the answer.

I mean, again, out of my pay grade in, in a simulation of Earth or say, let's say a simulation where we allow an intelligent AI to emerge, right?

And that, and that AI, we then give it the objective is to be curious, interact with other intelligence in its universe.

And then we might find the, the parameters required for that AI to work.

And I think you'll find if the AI will not talk to other AI's that don't share the ability to abstract the level of the AI, because it's just a cat.

And would you, are you going to travel 20 light years to go and pet a cat?

So not because of the inability to do so, but because of like boredom is it, it's more interested.

It will start talking to, it will spend most, it will spend a majority of its time talking to other AI systems that can at least someone understand.

It's much more fun.

It's a bit like, do we know that plants are conscious?

Well, plants unconscious in the way we typically think, but we don't talk to them.

They could be, right?

Yeah, but there's a lot of people on Earth who like gardening.

There's always going to be a weird.

They're not talking, they're just gardening.

Okay. Well, you're not romantic enough to see gardening as a way of communication between humans and plants.

Oh, okay. You've got me there.

But there's ways, there's always going to be the people who are curious.

Jane Goodall, who lives with the chimps, right?

There's always going to be curious intelligence species that visit the weird Earth planet and try to interact.

I mean, it's a, yeah, I think it's a super cool idea that you're expressing.

I just kind of have a sense, maybe it's a hope that there's always going to be a desire to interact, even with those that don't, can't possibly understand the depth of what you understand.

So I'm with you, so I want to be as positive as you that the aliens do exist and we will interact with them.

What I'm trying to do is to give you a reasonable hypothesis why we haven't yet.

And also something to strive for to be able to do that.

I mean, I, you know, there is the other view that the universe is just too big and life is just too rare.

But I want to come up with an alternative explanation, which I think is reasonable and not being philosophically and scientifically thought out,

which is this, if you can't actually communicate with the object, the person, the thing competently, you don't even know it's there, then there's no point yet.

See, I disagree with that, but I'm totally aligned with your hopeful vision, which is like, we need to understand the origin of life.

It will help us engineer life.

It will help us engineer intelligent life through perhaps on the computer side through simulation and explore all the ways that life emerges.

And that will allow us to, I think the fundamental reason we don't see overwhelming amounts of life is I actually believe aliens.

Of course, these are all just kind of open minded beliefs.

It's difficult to know for sure about any of this, but I think there's a lot of alien civilizations which are actively communicating with us and we're too dumb.

We don't have the right tools to see it.

That's what I'm saying.

No, but maybe I misinterpreted you, but I interpreted you just say they kind of tried a few times and they're like, oh God.

No, no, no.

What I'm saying is we, so this goes two ways.

Yeah, I agree with you.

There could be information out there, but just put in such a way that we just don't understand it yet.

Right.

So sorry if I didn't make that clear.

I mean, it's not just, I don't think we, I think we qualify as soon as we can decode their signal.

Right.

So when you say qualify, gotta got it.

So you mean we're just not smart enough.

The word qualify will stop me off.

So we're not smart enough to do it.

But we just need to get smarter.

And there's a lot of people who believe, let me get your opinion on this, about UFO sightings.

So sightings of weird phenomena that, you know, what does UFO mean?

It means it's a flying object and it's not identified clearly at the time of sighting.

That's what UFO means.

So it could be a physics phenomena, it could be ball lightning, it could be all kinds of fascinating.

I was always fascinated with ball lightning as a, like the fact that there could be physical phenomena in this world that are observable by the human eye.

Of course, all physical phenomena generally are fascinating that are, that really smart people can't explain.

I love that because it's like, wait a minute, especially if you can replicate it.

It's like, wait a minute, how does this happen?

That's like the precursor to giant discoveries in chemistry and biology and physics and so on.

But it sucks when those events are super rare, right?

Like leg ball lightning, so that's out there.

And then, of course, that phenomena could have other interpretations that don't have to do with the physics and chemistry, the biology of Earth.

It could have to do with more extraterrestrial explanations that, in large part, thanks to Hollywood and movies and all those kinds of things, captivates the imaginations of millions of people.

But just because it's science fiction that captivates the imagination of people doesn't mean that some of those sightings, all it takes is one.

One of those sightings is actually a sign that it's extraterrestrial intelligence, that it's an object that's not of this particular world.

Do you think there's a chance that that's the case?

What do you make, especially the pilot sightings, what do you make of those?

So, I agree there's a chance, there's always a chance, any good scientist would have to, or observationist would have to, you know, I want to see if aliens exist, come to Earth.

What I know about the universe is I think it's unlikely right now that there are aliens visiting us, but not impossible.

I think the release is the dramatization that's been happening politically saying we're going to release all this information, this classified information.

I was kind of disappointed because it was just very poor material.

And right now, the ability to capture high resolution video, everybody is carrying around with them an incredible video device now.

And we haven't got more compelling data.

And so that we've just seen grainy pictures, a lot of hearsay, instrument kind of malfunctions and whatnot.

And so I think on balance, I think it's extremely unlikely, but I think something really interesting is happening.

And also during the pandemic, right, we've all been locked down, we all want to have, we want to, our imaginations are, you know, running riot.

And I think that the, I don't think that the information out there is convinced me there are any, anything interesting on the UFO side.

But what it has made me very interested in about is how humanity is opening up its mind to ponder aliens and the mystery of our universe.

And so I don't want to dissuade people from having those thoughts and say, you're stupid and look at that, it's clearly incorrect.

That's not right. That's not fair.

What I would say is that I lack sufficient data, replicated observations to make me go, oh, I'm going to take this seriously.

But I'm really interested by the fact that there is this great deal of interest.

And I think that it drives me to maybe want to make an artificial life form even more and to help NASA and the Air Force and whoever go and look for things even more.

Because I think humanity wants to know what's out there.

There's this yearning, isn't there?

Yeah, but I see, I almost, depending on the day, I sometimes agree with you, but with the thing you just said.

But one of the disappointing things to me about the sightings, I still hold the belief that a nonzero number of them is an indication of something very interesting.

So I don't side with the people who say everything can be explained with like sensor artifacts kind of thing.

Yeah, I agree with you. I didn't say that either. I would say I just don't have enough data.

But the thing I want to push back on is the statement that everybody has a high definition camera.

One of the disappointing things to me about the report that the government released, but in general, having worked with government, having worked with people all over,

is how incompetent we are, like if you look at the response to the pandemic, how incompetent we are in the face of great challenges without great leadership,

how incompetent we are in the face of the great mysteries before us without great leadership.

And I just think it's actually the fact that there's a lot of high definition cameras is not enough to capture the full richness of weird,

of the mysterious phenomenon out there, of which extraterrestrial intelligence visiting Earth could be one.

I don't think we have, I don't think everybody having a smartphone in their pocket is enough.

I think that allows for TikTok videos. I don't think it allows for the capture of even interesting relatively rare human events.

That's not that common. It's rare to have been the right moment in the right time to be able to capture the thing.

I agree. I agree. Let me rephrase what I think on this. I haven't seen enough information. I haven't really actively sought it out.

I must admit, but I'm with you in that I love the idea of anomaly detection in chemistry in particular.

I want to make anomalies, sorry, or not necessarily make anomalies. I want to understand an anomaly.

Let me give you two from chemistry, which are really quite interesting.

Flaugiston going way back where people said this is thing called Flaugiston and for ages, the alchemists got really this kind of the fire is the thing.

That's one and we determined that Flaugiston wasn't what we thought it is.

Let's go to physics, the ether. The ethers are a hard one because I think actually the ether might exist and I'll tell you what I think the ether is later.

Can you explain ether?

The light traveling through the ether in the vacuum, there is some thing that we call the ether that basically mediates the movement of light.

Then the other one is cold fusion, which is more of a…

A few years ago, people observed that when they did some electrochemistry, when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, that you got more energy out than you put in.

People got excited and they thought that this was a nuclear reaction.

In the end, it was kind of discredited because you didn't detect neutrons and all that stuff.

I'm pretty sure, I'm a chemist, I'm telling you this on your podcast, but why not?

I'm pretty sure there's interesting electrochemical phenomena that's not completely bottomed out yet, that there is something there.

However, we lack the technology and the experimental design.

All I'm saying in your response about aliens is that we lack the experimental design to really capture these anomalies.

We are encircling the planet with many more detection systems.

We've got satellites everywhere.

I do hope that we are going to discover more anomalies and remember that the solar system isn't just static in space, it's moving through the universe.

There's just more and more chance.

I'm not one with Avi Loeb, he's generating all sorts of kind of a cult, I would say, with this, but I'm not against him.

I think there is a finite chance, if there are aliens in the universe, that we're going to happen upon them because we're moving through the universe.

What's the nature of the following that Avi Loeb has?

He's doubling down more and more and more and say there are aliens, interdimensional aliens and everything else, right?

He's gone from space junk accelerating out of to interdimensional stuff in a very short space of time.

I see.

He's obviously bored.

Or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand.

He's playfully kind of trying to interact with society and his peers to say, stop saying it's not possible, which I agree with, we shouldn't do that.

But we should frame it statistically in the same way we should frame everything as good scientists, statistically.

Yeah, good scientists. Recently, the idea of good scientists is, I take it quite skeptically.

I've been listening to a lot of scientists tell me about what is good science.

That makes me sad because you've been interviewed, what I would consider a lot of really good scientists.

No, that's true.

But that's exactly right and most of the people I talk to are incredible human beings, but there's a humility that's required.

Science cannot be dogmatism.

Sure, I agree.

Authority, a PhD does not give you authority.

A lifelong pursuit of a particular task does not give you authority.

You're just as lost and clues as everybody else, but you're more curious and more stubborn.

So that's a nice quality to have.

But overall, just using the word science and statistics can often, as you know, kind of become a catalyst for dismissing new ideas out of the box ideas, wild ideas, all that kind of stuff.

Well, yes and no, I think that some people find me extremely annoying in science because I'm basically quite rude and disruptive.

Not in a rude, you know, some people say they're ugly or stupid or anything like that.

I just say, you know, you're wrong.

Or why do you think this?

And something, a gift I got given by society when I was very young because I was in the learning difficulties class at school was I was told I was stupid.

And so I know I know I'm stupid, but I always wanted to be smart, right?

I remember going to school going, maybe today they're going to tell me I'm not as stupid as I was yesterday.

And it was always disappointed, always.

And so when I went into academia and everyone says, you're wrong, I was like, join the queue.

Because it allowed me to walk through the, you know, the wall.

So I think that people like to always imagine science as a bit like living in a Japanese house, paper walls, everyone sits in their paper in their room.

And I annoy people because I walk straight through the wall, not because why should I be a chemist and not a mathematician?

Why should I be a mathematician and not computer scientist?

Because if the problem requires us to walk through those walls, but I like walking through the walls.

But then I have to put up, you know, I have to do good science.

I have to win the people in those rooms across by good science, by taking their criticisms and addressing them head on.

And I think we must do that.

And I think that I try and do that in my own way.

And I kind of love walking through the walls.

And it gives me, it's difficult for me personally, it's quite painful.

But it always leads to a deeper understanding of the people I'm with.

In particular, you know, the arguments I have with all sorts of interesting minds.

Because I want to solve the problem or I want to understand more about why I exist.

You know, that's it really.

And I think we have to not dismiss science on that basis.

I think we can work with science.

No, science is beautiful, but humans with egos and all those kinds of things can sometimes misuse good things like social justice.

Like all ideas were all aspired to misuse these beautiful ideas to manipulate people to all those kinds of things.

And there's assholes in every space and walk of life, including science.

And those are no good, but yes, you're right.

The scientific method has proven to be quite useful.

That said, for difficult questions, for difficult explanations for rare phenomena, you have to walk cautiously.

Because the scientific method, when you totally don't understand something and it's rare and you can't replicate it, doesn't quite apply.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I agree with you.

The challenge is to not dismiss the anomaly because you can't replicate it.

I mean, we can talk about this.

This is something I realized when we were developing assembly theory.

People think the track they're on is so dogmatic, but there is this thing that they see but they don't see.

And it takes a bit of time and you just have to keep reframing it.

And my approach is to say, well, why can't this be right?

Why must we accept that RNA is the only way into life?

I mean, who said?

Does RNA have a special class of information that's encoded in the universe?

No, of course it doesn't.

You know, RNA is not a special molecule in the space of all the other molecules.

But it's so elegant and simple and it works so well for the evolutionary process that we kind of use that as an intuition to explain that that must be the only way to have life.

Sure.

But you mentioned assembly theory.

Well, first, let me pause.

Bathroom break needed?

Yeah, let's take two minutes.

We took a quick break and offline you mentioned to me that you have a lab in your home.

And then I said that you're basically Rick from Rick and Morty, which is something I've been thinking this whole conversation.

And then you say that there's a glowing pickle that you used something involving cold plasma, I believe.

I don't know, but can you explain the glowing pickle situation?

And is there many arbitrarily many versions of you in alternate dimensions that you're aware of?

I tried to make an electrochemical memory at home using a pickle and the only way I could get any traction with it was actually by plugging it into a very high voltage alternating current and then putting in a couple of electrodes.

But my kids weren't impressed.

They're not impressed with anything I do, any experiments I do at home, I think it's quite funny.

But you connected that pickle to some electrode.

240 volts AC and then had a couple of electrodes on it.

So what happens is a pickle, this is a classic thing you do.

I mean, I shouldn't pranks you do, you put a pickle into the mains and just will leave it, run away and leave it.

And what happens is it starts to decompose, heats up and then explodes because the water turns to steam and it just violently explodes.

But I wondered if I could cause the iron, sodium potassium ions in the pickle to migrate had been in a jar, right?

In a brine.

That was not my best experiment, so I've been far better experiments in my lab at home.

At that time was a failed experiment, but you never know, every experiment is a successful experiment if you stick with it long enough.

I mean, I got kicked out of my own lab by my research team many years ago and for good reason.

I mean, my team is brilliant and I used to go in and just break things.

So what I do do at home is I have a kind of electronics workshop and I prototype experiments there.

Then I try and suggest to my team sometimes, maybe we can try this thing.

And they would just say, oh, wow, that's not going to work because of this.

And I say, aha, but actually I've tried and here's some code and here's some hard work and we have a go.

So I'm doing that less and less now as I get even more busy.

But that's quite fun because then they feel that we're in the experiment together.

You do, in fact, brilliantly, just like Rick from Rick and Morty, connect up chemistry with computation.

So when we say chemistry, we don't mean the simulation of chemistry or modeling of chemistry.

We mean chemistry in the physical space as well as in the digital space, which is fascinating.

We'll talk about that.

But first you mentioned assembly theory, so we'll stick on theory in these big ideas.

I would say revolutionary ideas.

There's an intersection between mathematics and philosophy.

What is assembly theory?

And generally speaking, how would we recognize life if we saw it?

So assembly theory is a theory.

It goes back a few years now and my struggle for maybe almost 10 years when I was going to origin of life conferences and artificial life conferences,

where I thought that everybody was dancing around the problem of what life is and what it does.

But I'll tell you about what assembly theory is because I think it's easier.

So assembly theory literally says if you take an object, any given object,

and you are able to break that object into parts very gently, so just maybe let's say take a piece of very intricate Chinese porcelain,

and you tap it just with a hammer or the nail at some point, and it will fragment into many parts.

And if that object is able to fragment into many, and you count those parts, the different parts, so they're unsymmetrical.

Assembly theory says the larger the number of parts, unsymmetrical parts that object has,

the more likely it is that object has been created by an evolutionary or information process,

especially if that object is not one off, you've got an abundance of them.

And that's really important.

What I'm literally saying about the abundance, if you have a one off object and you break it into parts,

and it has lots of parts, you'd say, well, that could be incredibly intricate and complex, but it could be just random.

And I was troubled with this for years because I saw in reality that assembly theory works.

But when I talked to very good computational complexity computation lists, algorithmic complexity people,

they said, you haven't really done this properly, you haven't thought about it.

This is the random problem.

And so I kept working this up because I invented an assembly theory in chemistry, first of all, with molecules.

And so the thought experiment was, how complex does a molecule need to be when I find it,

that it couldn't possibly have risen by chance probabilistically.

And if I found this molecule able to detect enough quantities in the same object, like a machine, like a mass spectrometer.

So typically in a mass spectrometer, you weigh the molecules in electric field,

you probably have to have on the order of 10,000 identical molecules to get a signal.

So 10,000 identical molecules that are complex.

What is the chance of them occurring by chance?

Well, we can do the math.

Let's take a molecule like Strychnine or Strychnine is a good molecule actually to take.

Or Viagra is a good molecule.

I made jokes about Viagra because it's a complex molecule.

And one of my friends said, yeah, if we find Viagra on Mars in detectable quantities, we know something is up.

But anyway, it's a complex molecule.

So what you do is you take this molecule in the mass spectrometer and you hit it with some electrons or in electric field and it breaks apart.

And if the larger than the larger the number of different parts, you know, when it starts to get refresh old,

my idea was that that molecule could not be created by chance, probabilistically.

So that was where assembly thought theory was born in an experiment in a mass spec experiment.

And I was thinking about this because NASA sending the mass spectrometers to Mars to Titan is going to send them to Europa.

There's going to be a nuclear powered mass spectrometer going to Titan.

I mean, this is the coolest experiment ever.

They're not only sending a drone that's going to fly around Titan, it's going to be powered by a nuclear slug, a nuclear battery.

And it's going to have a mass spectrometer on it.

Is this already launched?

No, it's Dragonfly and it's going to be launched in a few years.

I think it got pushed a year because of the pandemic.

So I think it's real.

Dragonfly, nuclear Dragonfly is going to fly the Titan and collect data about the composition of the various chemicals on Titan.

Yeah, I'm trying to convince NASA.

I don't know if I'll be able to convince the Dragonfly team that they should apply this approach,

but they will get data and depending on how good their mass spectrometer is.

But I had this thought experiment anyway, and I did this thought experiment.

And for me, it seemed to work.

I turned the thought experiment into an algorithm in assembly theory.

And I basically, assembly theory, if I take, let's just make it generic and let's just take the word abracadabra.

So can I, if you find the word, so if you have a book with lots of words in it and you find abracadabra one off,

and there's a wrap book that's been written by, in a random way, you know, set of monkeys in a room.

Yeah, and typewriters.

And you're on typewriters and you find one off abracadabra, no big deal.

But if you find lots of recurrences of abracadabra, well, that means something weird is going on.

But let's think about the assembly number of abracadabra.

So abracadabra has a, you know, has a number of letters in it, you can break it down.

So you just cut the letters up.

But when you actually reassemble abracadabra, the minimum number of weights of organizing those letters.

So you'd have an A, a B, you know, and keep going up.

There's just the, you can, when you cut abracadabra up into parts, you can put it together again in seven steps.

So what does that mean?

That means if you basically don't read, you're allowed to reuse things you make in a chain at the beginning.

That's the memory of the universe, the process that makes abracadabra.

And because that causal chain, you can then get to abracadabra quicker than the number of letters for having to specify only in seven.

So if you take that to a molecule and you cut the molecule up into parts and you can on the causal chain and you basically start with the atoms and then bonds.

And then you randomly add on those parts to make the A, make the B, make the, and keep going all the way up.

I found that literally assembly theory allows me to say how compressed a molecule is.

So when there's some information in there.

And I realized the assembly theory isn't just confined to molecular space.

It can apply to anything, but let me finish the molecular argument.

So what I did is I had this theory.

I was one of my students, we wrote an algorithm.

We basically took 20 million molecules from the database and we just calculate their assembly number.

And that's the index.

Like basically if I take a molecule and I cut it up into bonds, what is the minimum number of steps I need to take to reform that molecule from atoms.

So reusability of previously formed things is somehow fundamental.

Exactly.

It's like a memory in the universe.

I'm making lots of leaps here.

It's kind of weird.

I'm saying, right, there's a process that can form the A and the B and the C, let's say.

And then because we've formed A and B before, we can use A and B again with no extra cost except one unit.

So that's the kind of the chain of events.

And that's how you think about memory here when you say the universe, when you talk about the universe or life is the universe creating memory.

Exactly.

So we went through chemical space and we looked at the assembly numbers and we were able to classify it.

So, okay, let's test it. Let's go. So we're able to take a whole bunch of molecules and assign an assembly index to them.

Okay.

And it's just a function of the number of bonds in the molecule and how much symmetry.

So literally assembly theory is a measure of how little symmetry a molecule has.

So the more asymmetry, the more information, the more weird it is like a Jackson Pollock or some description.

So I then went and did a load of experiments and I basically took those molecules.

I cut them up in the mass spec and measured the number of peaks without any knowledge of the molecule.

And we found the assembly number than the, there was a almost, not quite a one to one correlation, but almost because not all bonds are equal to have different energies.

I then did this using two other spectroscopic techniques, NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, which uses radio frequency to basically jangle the molecules and get a signature out.

And they also used infrared and infrared and NMR almost gave us a one to one correlation.

So what am I saying?

I'm saying by taking a molecule and doing either infrared or NMR or mass spec, I can work out how many parts there are in that molecule and then put it on a scale.

And what we did in the next part of the work is we took molecules randomly from the environment, from outer space, from all around Earth, from the sea, from Antarctica and from fossils and so on.

And even NASA, because they didn't believe us, blinded some samples.

And then we found that all these samples that came from biology produced molecules that had a very high assembly number above a threshold of about 15.

So basically, all the other stuff that came from my ebiotic origin was low.

There was no complexity there.

So we suddenly realized that on Earth, at least there is a cutoff that natural phenomena cannot produce molecules that need more than 15 steps to make them.

So I realized that this is a way to make a scale of life, a scale of technology as well.

And literally, you could just go sniffing for molecules off Earth on Titan, on Mars.

And when you find a molecule in the mass spectrometer that gives you more than 15 parts, you'll know pretty much for sure that it had to be produced by evolution.

And this allowed me to come up with a general definition of life based on assembly theory to say that if I find an object that has a large number of parts, say an iPhone or Boeing 747 or any complex object and I can find it in abundance and cut it up,

I can tell you whether that has been produced by an informational process or not.

And that's what assembly theory kind of does.

But it goes a bit further.

I then realized that this isn't just about life, it's about causation.

So actually, it tells you about where there's a causal structure.

So now I can look at objects in the universe, say that again, there's a cup and say, right, I'm going to look at how many independent parts it has.

So that's the assembly number.

I'll then look at the abundance, how many cups are two on this table, maybe there's a few more, you got stashed away.

So assembly is a function of the complexity of the object times the number of copy numbers of that object or a function of the copy number normalized.

So I realized there's a new quantity in the universe.

You have energy, entropy and assembly.

So assembly, the way we should think about that is how much reusability there is.

Reusability is like, can you play devil's advocate to this?

So could this just be a nice tertiary signal for living organisms?

Like some kind of distant signal that's, yeah, this is a nice property, but it's not capturing something fundamental.

Or do you think reusability is something fundamental to life in complex organisms?

I think reusability is fundamental in the universe, not just for life in complex organisms, it's about causation.

So I think assembly tells you, if you find objects, because you can do this with trajectories as well, if you think about it,

the fact there are objects in the universe on Earth is weird.

You think about it, we should just have a commentary explosion of stuff.

The fact that not everything exists is really weird.

As I'm looking at two mugs and two water bottles, and the things that exist are similar and multiply in copies.

So I would say that assembly allows you to do something that statistical mechanics and people looking at entropy have got stuck with for a while.

So I'm making, it's pretty bold.

I mean, I'm writing a paper with Sarah Walker on this at the moment.

And we're realizing, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves because I think that there's lots of ways where this is, you know, it's a really interesting idea.

It works for molecules, and it appears to work for any objects produced by causation.

Because you can take a motor car, you can look at the assembly of the motor car, look at a book, look at the assembly of the book.

Assembly theory tells you there's a way of compressing and reusing.

And so when people, I talk to information theorists, they say, oh, this is just logical death.

I say it is like logical death, but it's experimentally measurable.

They say, oh, it's a bit like comagolor of complexity.

I say, but it's computable.

And now, okay, it's not infinitely computable gets MP hard very quickly, right?

It's very hard problem when you could get, but it's a computable enough.

You could tractable enough to be able to tell the difference between a molecule that's been formed by the random background and by causation.

And I think that that's really interesting because until now, there's no way of measuring complexity objectively.

Complexity has required algorithmic comparisons and programs and human beings to label things.

Assembly is label free.

Well, not entirely.

We can talk about what that means in a minute.

Okay, my brain has been broken a couple of times here.

I'm sorry, I explained it really badly.

No, it was very well explained.

It was just fascinating and it's up.

My brain is broken into pieces and I'm trying to assemble it.

So, NP hard.

So, when you have a molecule, you're trying to figure out, okay, if we were to reuse parts of this molecule,

which parts can we reuse as an optimization problem and be hard?

To figure out the minimum amount of reused components that will create this molecule.

And it becomes difficult when you start to look at a huge, huge molecules arbitrarily large.

Because I'm also mapping this.

Can I think about this in complexity generally?

Like looking at a cellular automata system and saying, can this be used as a measure of complexity for an arbitrarily complicated system?

Yeah, I think it can.

It can.

And I think that the question is in what's the benefit?

Because there's plenty of, I mean, in computer science and mathematics and in physics,

people have been really seriously studying complexity for a long time.

And I think there's really interesting problems of where we coarse grade.

And we lose information.

And all assembly theory does really.

Assembly theory just explains weak emergence.

And so, what assembly theory says, look, going from the atoms that interact,

those first replicators that build one another.

Assembly at the minimal level just tells you evidence that there's been replication and selection.

And I think the more selected something is, the higher the assembly.

And so, we were able to start to know how to look for selection in the universe.

If you go to the moon, there's nothing a very high assembly on the moon except the human artifacts we've left there.

So, again, let's go back to the sandbox.

In assembly theory says, if all the sand grains could stick together,

that's the infinite combinatorial explosion in the universe.

That should be the default.

We don't have that.

Now, let's assemble sand grains together and do them in every possible way.

So, we have a series of minimal operations that can move the sand together.

But all that doesn't exist either.

Now, because we have specific memory where we say,

well, we're going to put three sand grains in a line or four and make a cross or a triangle or something unsymmetrical.

And once we've made the triangle and the unsymmetrical thing, we remember that.

We can use it again because on that causal chain.

So, what assembly theory allows you to do is go to the actual object that you find in space.

And actually, the way you get there is by disassembling it.

So, assembly theory works by disassembling objects.

You have an understanding of the steps to create them.

And it works for molecules beautifully because you just break bonds.

But like you said, assembly hard is very difficult.

It's a difficult problem to figure out how to break them apart.

For molecules, it's easy. If you just keep low enough in molecular weight space, it's good enough.

So, it's a complete theory.

When we start to think about objects, we can start to assign,

we can start to think about things at different levels, different atoms.

What do you assign as your atom?

So, in a molecule, the atom, this is really confusing because word atom, I mean smallest breakable part.

So, in a molecule, the atom is the bond because you break bonds, not atoms, right?

So, in a car, the atom might be, I don't know, a small amount of iron,

or the smallest reusable part, a rivet, a piece of plastic or something.

So, you've got to be really careful.

In a micro process, the atoms might be transistors.

And so, the amount of assembly is a function.

You have to look at the atom level.

Where are your parts? What are you counting?

That's one of the things you get to choose.

At what scale is the atom? What is the minimal thing?

I mean, there's a huge amount of tradeoffs.

When you approach a system and try to analyze, like if you approach Earth,

you're an alien civilization, try to study Earth,

what is the atom for trying to measure the complexity of life?

Are humans the atoms?

I would say to start with, you just use molecules.

I can say for sure, if there are molecules of sufficient complexity on Earth,

then I know that life has made them.

And you can go further and show technology.

There are molecules that exist on Earth that are not possible even by biology.

You needed technology and you needed micro processes to get there.

So, that's really cool.

And there's a correlation between the coolness of that and assembly number, whatever the measure.

What would you call the measure?

Assembly index.

So, there are three kind of fundamental kind of labels we have.

So, there's the quantity of assembly.

So, if you have a box, let's just have a box of molecules.

So, I'm going to have my box.

We count the number of identical molecules,

and then we chop each molecule up in an individual molecule class

and calculate assembly number.

So, basically, you then have a function that sums over all the molecules for each assembly,

and then you divide through.

So, you make it divide through by the number of molecules.

So, that's the assembly index for the box?

So, that will tell you the amount of assembly in the box.

So, basically, the assembly equation we come up with is like, basically,

the sum of e to the power of the assembly index for molecule i

times the number of copies of the molecule i, and then you normalize.

So, you sum them all up and then normalize.

So, some boxes are going to be more assembled than others.

Yeah, that's what they tell me.

So, if you were to look at me as a box, say I'm a box,

and my assemble my parts in terms of like, how do you know what's my assembly index?

So, be gentle.

So, let's just, we'll talk about the molecules in you.

So, let's just take a pile of sand the same way as you,

and I would take you and just cut up all the molecules.

I mean, and look at the number of copies and assembly number.

So, in sand, let's say, there's probably going to be nothing more than assembly number two or three,

but there might be trillions and trillions of sand grains.

In your body, there might be, the assembly number is going to be higher,

but there might not be quite as many copies because the molecular weight is higher.

So, you do want to average it out.

You do average it.

I'm not defined by the most impressive.

No, no, you're an average in your volume.

I mean, we're just working this out.

But what's really cool is that you're going to have a really high assembly.

The sand will have a very low assembly.

Your causal power is much higher.

You get to make decisions.

You're alive, you're aspiring.

Assembly says something about causal power in the universe.

And that's not supposed to exist because physicists don't accept that causation exists at the bottom.

So, I understand at the chemical level why the assembly is causation.

Why is it causation?

Because it's capturing the memory.

Exactly.

It's capturing memory, but there's not an action to it.

So, I'm trying to see how it leads to life.

Well, it's what life does.

So, I think we don't know.

It's a good question.

What is life versus what does life do?

Yeah, so this is the definition of life, the only definition we need.

What's the assembly?

In other words, life is able to create objects in abundance that are so complex.

The semi number is so high, they can't possibly form in an environment where there's just random interactions.

So, suddenly you can put life on a scale.

And then life doesn't exist, actually, in that case.

It's just how evolved you are.

And you as an object, because you have incredible causal power, you can go and launch rockets or build cars or create drugs.

You can do so many things.

You can build stuff, build more artifacts that show that you have had causal power.

And that causal power is kind of a lineage.

And I think that over time, I mean, realizing that physics as a discipline has a number of problems associated with it.

Well, me as a chemist is kind of interesting that assembly theory, and I'm really, you know, I want to maintain some credibility in the physics side, but I have to push them because physics is a really good discipline.

Physics is about reducing the belief system.

But they're down to some things in their belief system, which is kind of really makes me kind of grumpy.

Number one is requiring order at the beginning of the universe magically, we don't need that.

The second is the second law.

Well, we don't actually need that.

This is blasphemous.

In a minute, I'll recover my career in a second.

Although I think the only good thing about being the religious chair means I think there has to be an act of parliament to fire me.

Yeah.

But you can always go to least Twitter and protest.

And I think the third thing is that, so we've got, you know, we've got the order at the beginning.

Second law.

The second law, and the fact that causation is emergent, right?

And that time is emergent.

John Carroll just turned off this program.

I think he believes that it's emergent.

So causation is not emergent.

That's clearly incorrect.

Because we wouldn't exist otherwise.

So physicists have kind of got confused about time.

Time is a real thing.

Well, I mean, so look, I'm very happy with the current description of the universe as physics give me because I can do a lot of stuff, right?

I can go to the moon with Newtonian physics, I think.

And I can understand the orbit of Mercury with relativity.

And I can build transistors with quantum mechanics, right?

And I can do all this stuff.

So I'm not saying the physics is wrong.

I'm just saying, if we say that time is fundamental, i.e. time is nonnegotiable, there's a global clock.

I don't need to, I don't need to require that there's order been magically made in the past because that asymmetry is built into the way the universe is.

So if time is fundamental, I mean, you've been referring to this kind of an interesting formulation that is memory.

Yeah.

So time, time is hard to like put a finger on like what the hell are we talking about?

Well, it's just the direction, but memory is a construction, especially when you have like, think about these local pockets of complexity, these nonzero assembly index entities that's being constructed and they remember.

Never forget molecules.

But remember, the thing is, I invented assembly theory.

I'll tell you how I invented it.

When I was a kid, I mean, the thing is I keep making fun of myself to my search group.

I've only ever had one idea.

I keep exploring that idea over the 40 years or so since I had that idea.

Well, aren't you the idea that the universe had?

So it's very kind of hierarchical.

Anyway, go ahead, I'm sorry.

That's very poetic.

So I think I came up with assembly theory the following idea when I was a kid, I was obsessed about survival kits.

What is the minimum stuff I would need to basically replicate my reality?

And I love computers and I love technology or what technology was going to become.

So I imagined that I would have basically this really big truck full of stuff.

And I thought, well, can I delete some of that stuff out?

Can I have a blueprint?

And then in the end, I kept making this, making it smaller and got to maybe a half a truck into a suitcase.

And then I went, okay, screw it.

I want to carry my entire technology in my pocket.

How do I do it? And I'm not like going to launch into Steve Jobby and, you know, I play.

I came up with a matchbox survival kit.

In that matchbox survival kit, I would have the minimum stuff that would allow me to interact the environment to build my shelter, to build a fishing rod, to build a water purification system.

And it's kind of like, so what did I use in my box to assemble in the environment, to assemble, to assemble, to assemble.

And I realized I could make a causal chain in my survival kit.

So I guess that's probably why I've been obsessed with assembly theory for so long.

And I was just pre configured to find it somewhere.

And when I saw it in molecules, I realized that the causal structure that we say emerges and the physics kind of gets really stuck because they're saying that time, you can go backwards in time.

I mean, how do we let physicists get away with the notion that we can go back in time and meet ourselves?

I mean, that's clearly a very hard thing to allow.

Physicists would not let other sciences get away with that kind of heresy, right?

So why are physicists allowed to get away with it?

So first of all, to push back, to play devil's advocate, you are clearly married to the idea of memory.

You see in this, again, from Rick and Morty way, you have these deep dreams of the universe that is writing the story through its memories, through its chemical compounds that are just building on top of each other.

And they find useful components that can reuse.

And then their reused components create systems that themselves are then reused and all in this way construct things.

But when you think of that as memory, it seems like quite sad that you can walk that back.

But at the same time, it feels like that memory, you can walk in both directions on that memory in terms of time.

You could walk in both directions, but I don't think that that makes any sense.

Because the problem that I have with time being reversible is that, I mean, I'm just a, you know, I'm a dumb experimental chemist, right?

So I love burning stuff, burning stuff and building stuff.

But when I think of reversible phenomena, I imagine in my head, I have to actually manufacture some time.

I have to borrow time from the universe to do that.

I can't, when anyone says, let's imagine that we can go back in time or reversibility, you can't do that.

You can't step out of time. Time is nonnegotiable. It's happening.

No, but see, you're assuming that time is fundamental, which most of us do when we go day to day.

But it takes a leap of wild imagination to think that time is emergent.

No, time is not emergent.

Yeah, I mean, this is an argument we can have, but I believe I can come up with an experiment.

An experiment that proves that time cannot possibly be emergent.

An experiment that shows how assembly theory kind of is the way that the universe produces selection and that selection gives rise to life.

And also to say, well, hang on, we could allow ourselves to have a theory that requires us to have these statements to be possible.

Like we need to have order in the past or we can have used the past hypothesis, which is order in the past as well.

And we have to have an arrow of time. We have to require the entropy increases.

And then we can say, look, the universe is completely closed and there's no novelty or that novelty is predetermined.

What I'm saying is very, very important that time is fundamental, which means if you think about it, the universe becomes more and more novel each step.

It generates as more states and next step than it was before.

That means bigger search.

So what I'm saying is that the universe wasn't capable of consciousness at day one.

Actually, because you didn't have enough states.

But today the universe is complex.

So it's like, all right, all right, hold on a second. Now we've pissed off the pants like it's two. Okay.

No, there's brilliant. Sorry.

A part of me is just joking having fun with this thing, but because you're saying a lot of brilliant stuff and I'm trying to slow it down before my brain explodes.

Because I want to break apart some of the fascinating things you're saying.

So novelty, novelty is increasing in the universe because the number of states is increasing. What do you mean by states?

So I think the physicists almost got everything right. I can't fault them at all.

I just think there's a little bit of dog. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. I'm very happy to be entirely wrong on this, right?

I'm not right on many things at all.

But if I can make less assumptions about the universe with this, then potentially that's a more powerful way of looking at things.

If you think of time as fundamental, you can make less assumptions overall.

Exactly.

If time is fundamental, I don't need to add on a magical second law because the second law comes out of the fact the universe is actually there's more states available.

I mean, we might even be able to do weird things like dark energy in the universe might actually just be time, right?

Yeah, but then you have to still have to explain why time is fundamental because I can give you one explanation that's simpler than time and say God.

You know, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's...

But you still have to explain God and you still have to explain time. Why is it fundamental?

So let's just say existence is default, which means time is the default.

How did you go from the existence to the thought the time is the default?

Well, we exist, right?

So let's just be very...

We're yet to talk about what exists means.

All right, let's go all the way back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's very poetic and beautiful what you're weaving into this.

I don't think this conversation is even about the assembly, which is fascinating and we'll keep mentioning it as something index and this idea that I don't think is necessarily connected to time.

Oh, I think it is deeply connected.

I can't explain it yet.

You don't think everything you've said about assembly theory and assembly index can still be correct even if time is emergent.

Yeah, right now, assembly theory appears to work.

I appear to be able to measure objects of high assembly in a mass spectrum and look at their abundance and all that's fine, right?

If nothing else, it's a nice way of looking at how molecules can compress things.

Now, am I saying that a time has to be fundamental or not emergent for assembly theory to work?

No, I think I'm saying that the universe, it appears that the universe has many different ways of using time.

You could have three different types of time.

You could just have time that's the way I would think of it.

If you want to hold on to emergent time, I think that's fine.

Let's do that for a second.

Hold on to emergent time and the universe is just doing its thing.

Then assembly time only exists when the universe starts to write memories through bonds.

Let's just say there's rocks running around, when the bond happens and selection starts, suddenly the universe is remembering cause and in the past.

Those structures will have effects in the future.

Suddenly a new type of time emerges at that point which has a direction.

I think Sean Carroll at this point might even turn the podcast back on and go, okay, I can deal with that, that's fine.

But I'm just basically trying to condense the conversation and say, hey, let's just have time fundamental and see how that screws with people's minds.

You're triggering people by saying fundamental.

Why not?

Let's say, I'm walking through the wall.

Why should I grow up in a world where time, I don't go back in time.

I don't meet myself in the past.

There are no aliens coming from the future.

That's like saying we're talking about biology or evolutionary psychology and you're saying, okay, let's just assume that clothing is fundamental.

People wearing clothes is fundamental.

It's like, no, no, no, wait a minute.

I think you're getting in a lot of trouble if you assume time is fundamental.

Why?

Give me one reason why I'm getting into trouble with time being fundamental.

Because you might not understand the origins of this memory that might be deeper.

That could be a thing that's explaining the construction of these higher complexities better than just saying it's a search.

It's chemicals doing a search for reusable structures that they can then use as bricks to build the house.

Okay, so I accept that.

So let's go back a second because I wanted to drop the time bomb at this part because I think we can carry on discussing it for many, many, many, many days, many months.

But I'm happy to accept that it might be wrong.

But what I would like to do is imagine a universe where time is fundamental and time is emergent and ask, let's just then talk about causation because physicists require that causation.

So this is where I'm going to go.

Causation emerges and it doesn't exist at the micro scale.

Well, that clearly is wrong because if causation has to emerge at the macro scale, life cannot emerge.

So how does life emerge?

Life requires molecules to bump into each other, produce replicators.

Those replicators need to produce polymers.

There needs to be cause and effect at the molecular level.

There needs to be in a girdic, non a girdic to an a girdic transition at some point.

And those replicators have material consequence in the universe.

Physicists just say, oh, you know what, I'm going to have a bunch of particles in the box.

I'm going to think about it in a Newtonian way, in a quantum way, and I'll add on a narrow time so I can label things.

And causation will happen magically later.

Well, how? Explain causation.

And they can't.

The only way I can reconcile causation is having a fundamental time because this allows me to have a deterministic universe that creates novelty.

And there's so many things to unpack here.

But let's go back to the point.

You said, can assembly theory work with immersion time?

Sure it can, but it doesn't give me a deep satisfaction about how causation and assembly gives rise to these objects that move through time and space.

And again, what am I saying?

To bring it back, I can say without fear, you know, take this water bottle and look at this water bottle and look at the features on it.

There's writing, you've got a load of them.

I know that causal structures gave rise to this.

In fact, I'm not looking at just one water bottle here.

I'm looking at every water bottle that's ever been conceived of by humanity.

This here is a special object.

In fact, Leibniz knew this.

Leibniz, who was at the same time of Newton, he kind of got stuck.

I think Leibniz actually invented assembly theory.

He gave soul, the soul that you see in objects wasn't the mystical soul, it is assembly.

It is a fact there's been a history of objects related and without the object in the past, this object wouldn't exist.

There is a lineage and there is conserved structures, causal structures have given rise to those.

Fair enough.

And you're saying it's just a simpler view with time is fundamental.

And it shakes the physicist's cage a bit, right?

But I think that...

I just enjoy the fact that physicists are in cages.

I would say that Leigh Smolin, I don't want to speak for Leigh.

I'm talking to Leigh about this.

Leigh also is an agreement that time has to be fundamental, but I think he goes further.

Even in space, I don't think you can go back to the same place in space.

I've been to Austin a few times now, this is my...

I think third time I've been to Austin.

Is Austin in the same place? No.

The solar system is moving through space.

I'm not going back in the same space.

Locally I am.

Every event in the universe is unique.

In space.

And time.

Doesn't mean we can't go back though.

I mean, let's just rest this conversation, which was beautiful,

with a quote from the Rolling Stones that you can't always get what you want,

which is you want time to be fundamental.

But if you try, you'll get what you need, which is assembly theory.

Okay, let me ask you about...

Continue talking about complexity.

And to clarify with this beautiful theory of yours that you're developing,

and I'm sure we'll continue developing both in the lab and in theory.

Yeah, it can't be said enough.

Just the ideas you're playing with in your head,

and we've been talking about are just beautiful.

So if we talk about complexity a little bit more generally,

maybe in an admiring romantic way,

how does complexity emerge from simple rules?

The why, the how?

Okay, the nice algorithm of assembly is there.

I would say that the problem I have right now is,

I mean, you're right, we can, about time as well.

The problem is I have this hammer called assembly,

and everything I see is a nail.

So now let's just apply it to all sorts of things.

We take the Bernard instability, the Bernard instability is,

you have oil, if you heat up oil,

let's say on a frying pan, when you get convection,

you get honeycomb patterns.

Take the formation of snowflakes, right?

Take the emergence of a tropical storm,

or the storm on Jupiter.

When people say, let's talk about complexity in general,

what they're saying is, let's take this collection of objects

that are correlated in some way,

and try and work out how many moving parts

or how this exists.

So what people have been doing for a very long time

is taking complexity and counting what they've lost,

calculating the entropy.

And the reason why I'm pushing very hard on assembly

is entropy tells you how much you've lost.

It doesn't tell you the microstates are gone.

But if you embrace the bottom up of the assembly,

the bottom up of the assembly, those states,

and you then understand the causal chain

that gives rise to the emergence.

So what I think assembly will help us do

is understand weak emergence, at the very least,

and maybe allow us to crack open complexity in a new way.

And I've been fascinated with complexity theory

for many years.

As soon as I learned of the Mandelbrot set

and I could just type it up in my computer and run it

and just show it and see it unfold,

it was just this mathematical reality

that existed in front of me.

I just found incredible.

But then I realized that actually we were cheating.

We're putting in the boundary conditions all the time.

We're putting in information.

And so when people talk to me about the complexity of things,

I say, but relative what? How do you measure them?

So my attempt, my small attempt,

naive attempt,

because there's many greater minds than mine on the planet right now

thinking about this properly

and you've had some of them on the podcast, right?

They're just absolutely fantastic.

But I'm wondering if we might be able to reformat

the way we would explore algorithmic complexity using assembly.

What's the minimum number of constraints we need

in our system for this to unfold?

So whether it's like, you know,

if you take some particles and put them in a box

at a certain box size,

you get quasi crystallinity coming out, right?

But that quite that emergence, it's not magic.

It must come from the boundary conditions you put in.

So all I'm saying is a lot of the complexity that we see

that we see is a direct read of the constraints we put in,

but we just don't understand.

So as I said earlier to the poor origin of life chemists,

you know, origin of life is a scam.

I would say lots of complexity calculation theories,

a bit of a scam, because we put the constraints in,

but we don't count them correctly.

And I'm wondering if...

Oh, you're thinking and starting to drop.

As assembly theory,

assembly index is a way to count the constraints.

Yes, that's it. That's all it is.

So assembly theory doesn't lower any of the importance

of complexity theory,

but it allows us to go across domains

and start to compare things,

compare the complexity of a molecule,

of a microprocessor,

of the texture of writing,

of the music you may compose.

You've tweeted, quote,

assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood

we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom.

So we've applied assembly theory to sell your automata

in life and chemistry.

What does Nietzsche have to do with assembly theory?

Oh, that gets me into free will and everything.

So let me say that again,

assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood

we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom.

Limited freedom, I suppose,

is referring to the fact that there's constraints.

Yeah.

Or what is radical freedom?

What is radical freedom? What is freedom?

So Sartre was like believed in absolute freedom

and that he could do whatever he wanted

in his imagination.

And Nietzsche understood that his freedom

was somewhat more limited.

And it kind of takes me back to this computer game

that I played when I was 10.

So I think it's called Dragon's Lair.

Okay.

Do you know Dragon's Lair?

I think I know Dragon's Lair.

Dragon's Lair has been conned, right?

Dragon's Lair, when you play the game,

you're lucky that you grew up in a basically

procedurally generated world.

That was RPG a little bit.

No, it's like, is it turn based play?

Was it? No.

It was a role playing game, but really good graphics

and one of the first laser discs.

And when you actually flick the stick,

it's like it was like a graphical adventure game

with animation.

And when I played this game, I really,

you could get through the game in 12 minutes

and you knew what you were doing from not making mistakes.

You just play the disc, play the disc, play the disc.

So it was just about timing

and actually it was a complete fraud

because all the animation has been pre recorded on the disc.

Yeah.

It's like the black mirror, the first interactive

where they had all the, you know, several million

kind of permutations of the movie

that you could select on Netflix.

I've forgotten the name of it.

So this was exactly that in the laser disc.

You basically go left, go right, fight the yoga,

slay the dragon.

And when you flick the joystick at the right time,

it just goes to the next animation to play.

It's not really generating it.

And I played that game and I knew I was being had.

Oh, okay.

So to you,

dragging there is the first time you realize

that free will is an illusion.

Yeah.

And why does assembly theory

give you hints about free will,

whether it's an illusion or not?

Yeah.

I do think I have some will.

And I think I am an agent and I think I can interact

and I can play around with my,

with the models I have of the world

and the cost functions, right?

And I can hack my own cost functions,

which means I have a little bit of free will.

But as much as I want to do stuff in the universe,

I don't think I could suddenly say,

I mean, actually this is ridiculous

because now I say I could try and do it, right?

It's like I'm suddenly give up everything

and become a rapper tomorrow, right?

Maybe I could try that,

but I don't have sufficient agency

to make that necessarily happen.

I'm on a trajectory.

So when in Dragon's layer,

I know that I have some trajectories

that I can play with,

where Sartre realized he thought

that he had no assembly, no memory.

He could just leap across and do everything.

And Nietzsche said,

okay, I realize I don't have full freedom,

but I have some freedom.

And assembly theory basically says that,

it says, if you have these constraints in your past,

limit what you were able to do in the future,

but you can use them to do amazing things.

Let's say I'm a poppy plant

and I'm creating some opiates.

The opiates are really interesting molecules.

I mean, they're obviously great for medicine,

great problems in society,

but let's imagine we fast forward a billion years.

What will the opioids look like in a billion years?

Well, we can guess because we can see

how those proteins will evolve

and we can see how the secondary metabolites

will change.

But they can't go radical.

They can't suddenly become,

I don't know, like a molecule that you find

in an OLED in a display.

They will be limited by their causal chain

that produced them.

And that's what I'm getting at, saying,

we are unpredictably predictable

or predictably unpredictable within a constraint

on the trajectory we're on.

Yeah, so the predictably part is the constraints

of the trajectory.

And the unpredictable part is the part

that you still haven't really clarified

the origin of the little bit of freedom.

Yeah.

So you're just arguing,

you're basically saying that radical freedom

is impossible.

You're really operating in a world of constraints

that are constrained by the memory

of the trajectory of the chemistry

that led to who you are.

But even just a tiny bit of freedom,

even if everything, if everywhere you are in cages,

if you can move around in that cage a little bit,

you're free.

I agree.

And so the question is in assembly theory,

if we're thinking about free will,

where does the little bit of freedom come from?

What is the I?

They can decide to be a rapper.

What, why, what is that?

What is that?

That's a cute little trick we've convinced each other of.

So we can do fun tricks at parties

or is there something fundamental

that allows us to feel free, to be free?

I think that that's the question

that I want to answer.

I know you want to answer it.

And I think it's so profound.

Let me have a go at it.

I would say that I don't take the stance of Sam Harris

because I think Sam Harris,

when he said the way he says it is almost,

it's really interesting.

I'd love to talk to him about it.

Sam Harris almost thinks himself out of existence.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, well, I mean,

he has different views on consciousness versus free will.

I think he saves himself with consciousness.

He thinks himself out of existence with free will.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So that means there's no point, right?

He's a leaf floating on a river.

Yeah.

I think that he,

I don't know, I'd love to ask him

whether he really believes that

and then we could play some games.

No, no, I then would say,

I'll get him to play a game of cards with me