YouSaid · the spoken record

Lee Cronin

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2022-03-11
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2022-03-11
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  1. “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?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Got more compelling data. And so that we've just seeing grainy pitches, 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, our imaginations are running riot. And I think that I don't think that the information out there has convinced me there are anything interesting on the UFO side. But what it has made me very interested 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, I agree there's a chance, there's always a chance. Any good scientist would have to observation this 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 releases, 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...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “No, no, no. What I'm saying is, 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. So sorry if I didn't make that clear. I mean, it's not just I don't think we qualify as soon as we can decode their signal”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So, I am with you. So, I want to be as positive as you that 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, 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 been 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”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's a bit like, do we know that plants are conscious? Well, plants aren't conscious in the way we typically think, but we don't talk to them. They could be, right?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We might actually find the answer. I mean, again, out of my pay grade in a simulation of a, for let's say a simulation where we allow an intelligent AI to emerge, right? 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 parameters required for that AI to and I think you'll find if the AI will not talk to other AIs that don't share the ability to abstract the level of the AI because it's just a cat. And are you going to travel 20 light years to go and pet a cat?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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, that it would be so counterproductive interacting with intelligent alien species that it would cause more angst for human race.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So tracked us. Within a species, that's fine. But I think we don't actually abstract them. No, actually, I think in this talk, in this conversation, you've helped me crystallize something that I think is... Been troubling me for a long time with a thermoparadox. I'm pretty sure that a reasonable avenue is to say that you would not go and talk to your cat about calculus, right?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “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 the 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, our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be, we probably haven't been communicating with them.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “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 in this.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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. That means our description, 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Maybe they have. I mean, maybe 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 the critical point that 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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 the 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 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 there. 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 life on Earth had happened again would be safe.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “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 elephant, the emergence of elephants was wired into the history of Earth in some way, like the gravitational force, how evolution was going, Cambrian explosions, blah, blah, blah, the emergence of mammals. But I just don't know enough about the contingency, right? The variability. All I do know is you count the number of bits of information required to make an element, sorry, an elephant and think about the causal chain that provide the lineage of elephants going all the way back to Luca, there's a huge scope for divergence.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “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, and so is humor.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I just think so, what does TikTok? TikTok is a social media where people upload videos, right, of silly videos. So I guess there might be.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Many. That's the point. And the thing is, this is where the origin of life scam comes in that people don't quite 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. 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 Earth-like 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Exoplanets, I think, not brilliantly, but we'll be able to start to classify them. And we'll start to get a real 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 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “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 input, just creating a model planet of 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”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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, you know, with Brad Pitt in it and saying there is no life and it's all, you know, we've got life on Earth is more precious. And Cosmos, which is a UK production, which basically aliens came and visited Earth one day and they were discovered in the UK, right? It was quite, it's a fun film. But I really loved those two films. And at the same time, those films, at the time those films are coming out, I was working on a paper, a life detection paper, and I found it was so hard to publish this paper. And it was almost as depressed. I got so depressed trying to get this science out there that I felt the depression of the film in Alastra, like life, there's no life elsewhere in the universe.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “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 thought it was. And so if we just take Earth as a marker, and if I think that life is a much more general phenomenon 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, you know. I'm just saying that perhaps...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “But I did say technological, so I think I agree with you. Dead World, no prospect of alive. Prebiotic world life emerging, living and technological. And you probably were, and the dead one, you probably won't be able to tell between the dead, never been alive, and the dead one, maybe got some 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, you know, one way that life might survive on Earth is if we can work out how to deal with the coming, the real climate change that comes when the sun expands. It might be a way to survive that, you know. But, yeah, I think that we need to start thinking statistically when it comes to looking for life in the universe.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And suddenly it's a bit like I want to classify planets the way we're classifying stars. And I think that in terms of their, rather than having this, oh, we've 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “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, we'll know statistically most stars have planets around them. What type of planet 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? So with intelligence on them, and will they have died? So had life on them, but not the...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Thanks for that. And then it just carries on. So I'm not going, 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. There's a really good reason to go there. But I think it's more unlikely because the gravitational situation in the solar system, if we find life in the outer solar system,”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “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 was like, I don't need to start again.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It could be possible because life was like, so 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “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 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 we're all 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. In the outer solar system, we might have completely different life forms on Enceladus, on Europa and Tyson. And that would be a cool thing.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “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 lifeform that could basically, and I don't want to do this, and 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 lifeform. So it's not quite alive. It's almost like an add-on that we can a time dependent add-on you could give to, say, cyanobacteria in the ocean or to maybe to wheat and say, 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. It hasn't really done, it's not the solution is.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “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 humanity's global psychological state meaning going forward.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “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 talk about. And then there are people on the creationist side who are 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. Yeah, and so I find that really frustrating because actually the origin of life researchers are all working in good faith, right?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “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 where things might go wrong in the same way as Twitter turning ourselves into kind of strange scale effects. I would love to line.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “We're very far away from that. That doesn't mean we should ignore it. Same with the origin of life catastrophe. It's not coming anytime soon. We shouldn't ignore it, but we shouldn't let that fear stop us from doing those experiments.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I would wager a vast quantity of money. I'm not very rich, so it would 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 will 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. The fear about making a lethal life form in the lab from scratch is similar to us imagining that we're going to make the Terminator at Boston Dynamics tomorrow. Simply not, and I, and the problem is, we don't communicate that properly. I know you yourself very, you explain this very well. There is not the AI catastroph coming.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Perhaps too much associated with the scam, and so they're using molecules that were 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 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,”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Experiment, and everything is sanitized, and we put in inorganic materials, and we have cycles with them day-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...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “But there is a very good thing 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 put in, we can do it, we can do responsible life. Or as I fantasized with my research group on our away day, they would go and it's, you know, I think it's actually morally if we don't find, if you humanity finds life in the universe, this is going on a 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, I'm sure. Some people might argue with me about that, but I think that we need more life in the universe.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “You could do that. You could insist and say, look, I'm going to take not just in organic, 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 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 for a very, don't worry, it's going to be very feeble, it's not going to take over the world. There's ways of ethically containing it.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Just inorganic, just inorganic stuff. Like basically just so sand is just silicon oxide with some other ions in it, maybe some inorganic carbon, some carbonates. Just basically clearly dead stuff. You could just grind rocks into sand.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Yeah, I think that nobody has made life in the lab from scratch. Lots of people would argue that they have made progress. So Craig Ventner, I think the synthesis of a synthetic genome milestone in human achievement. Brilliant.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “But it is remarkable that he could not make herself from scratch, and even now today synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch, because some contingent information embodied outside the genome in the cell, and that is just incredible. So there's lots of layers to the scam.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “If we just make this RNA, we've got this fluke event. We know how that's simple. Let's make this phosphodiester or let's make ATP or ADP. 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, Cindy, 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 facsimiled 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 and put in his genes, synthesized, the cell could boo up.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “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. I used to complain there's more money being spent searching for the Higgs boson that we know exists and 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 and we're going to be able to 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. We need to understand that although we're precious, we're not the only life forms in the universe. Or 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 more than a belief by experimentation. But coming back to the scam, the scam is...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “And they say, Oh, that's the root. That's the way cars emerged 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.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “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 country X that has never had a Tesla before and they get the Tesla. And they take the test, and what they do is they take the tests 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”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source