Lex Fridman PodcastLee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #269
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,061 words- 0:00 – 2:02
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Lee Cronin, a chemist from University of Glasgow, who's one of the most fascinating, brilliant, out of the box thinking scientists I've ever spoken to. This episode was recorded more than two weeks ago, so the war in Ukraine is not mentioned. I've 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 a- 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 a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Lee Cronin.
- 2:02 – 15:27
Life and chemistry
- LFLex Fridman
How do you think life originated on earth and what insights does that give us about life?
- LCLee Cronin
If we go back to the origin of earth and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago, the 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, 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 c- curiosity is that life happened fast.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, so when we say fast, th- th- this is a pretty surprising fact that maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate, but it, it seems like m- most, like 70 or 80% of the time that earth has been around there's 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 organism it seems-
- LCLee Cronin
Sure.
- LFLex Fridman
... 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, th- 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.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. I agree.
- LFLex Fridman
A lot.
- LCLee Cronin
I think it's much more inevitable and I think, um, I tried to kind of pro- not provoke but try and push chemists to think about this, because chemists are part central to this problem, right? Of understanding the origin of life on earth at least because we're made of- we're made of chemistry. But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet, also the emergence of life on planet is as, um, 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, um, and we can get into this I think in quite some detail, but I think I n- to, to come back to your question, I have r- 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, uh, while.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you say all the words again? So you said selection.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So natural selection, A- the original A/B testing.
- LCLee Cronin
And so, and then complexity and then, uh, the degree of autonomy and sophistication because I think that people misunderstand what life is, um, some people say that life is a cell and some people that say that life is a, um, a virus or life is a, you know, um, a- an on/off switch. I don't think it's that, life is the universe developing a memory and, um, the laws of physics and the way f- well there are no laws of physics. Physics is just memory-free stuff, right? (laughs) So there's only a finite number of ways you can arrange the fundamental particles to do things.
- LFLex Fridman
Life is the universe developing a memory.
- LCLee Cronin
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
So it's like sewing a piece of art slowly and then you can look back at it, so... so there's a stickiness to life, it's like universe doing stuff-
- LCLee Cronin
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
... and when you say memory it's like there's a stickiness to a bunch of the stuff that's building together.
- LCLee Cronin
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
So like you can in a, uh, stable way, like, um, trace back the complexity and that tells a coherent story.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, and I think, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. That's, by the way, very poetic (laughs) and beautiful.Life is the universe developing a memory. Hmm. Okay. And then there's autonomy, you said, and complexity we'll talk about.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
But it's a really interesting idea that selection preceded biology.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. I think-
- LFLex Fridman
So- so what, first of all, what is chemistry? Like, does sand still count as chemistry?
- LCLee Cronin
Sure? I mean, as a chemist, a card-carrying chemist, if I'm allowed a card, I don't know. I don't know what I am most days
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
What is the card made of?
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
What's the chemical composition of the card?
- 15:27 – 25:51
Self-replicating molecules
- LFLex Fridman
uh, (laughs) who's von Neumann? What's a constructor? The closing of the loop that you're talking about, uh, the- the molecule that starts becoming the- I think you said like the smallest von Neumann constructor?
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
The smallest, the minimal. So, uh, what do all those things mean and what is, uh, uh, are we supposed to imagine when we think about the smallest v- von Neumann constructor?
- LCLee Cronin
So, John von Neumann is a h- real hero, actually, if- not just me, but many people, I think computer science and- a- and- and physics. He was an incredible intellect, um, who probably solved a lot of the problems that we're working on today and just forgot to write them down. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- LCLee Cronin
Um, and, um, I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny, as I think his friends called him, but it's, um... I- I think he was Hungarian, a mathematician, came to the US and, um, basically got- was involved in the Manhattan Project in developing computation and, um, came up with all sorts of ideas, and I think it was one of the first people to come- come up with cellular automata, and- but he-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, really? I didn't know this little fact. Interesting.
- LCLee Cronin
I think so. I think so, and I think it's-
- LFLex Fridman
Well, anyway, if- if he didn't come up with it, he probably did come up with it and didn't write it down.
- LCLee Cronin
There was a couple of people who 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 th- this may be incorrect recollection, but this... So a lot of what I say is going to be kind of, you know, just way out of my, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
You're really... You're just part of the universe, um, creating its memory, designing...
- LCLee Cronin
Exactly, yeah. Yeah, rewriting history.
- LFLex Fridman
Rewriting history. (laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
Exactly. Imperfectly. So but what I mean is, I think he- he would- he liked this idea of thinking about, um, 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 was- wanted to conceive of a minimal thing, Autonoma, o- or 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, um, and I'm really fascinated by that because I think that, um, although it's probably not exactly what happened, um, 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- with no architect, and 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, um, 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 d- different to AB, and then AB prime...... can then act back where A and B were being created, and slightly nudge that causal chain and make A, B prime more, um, evolvable or learn more. So, that's the closing the loop part.
- LFLex Fridman
Closing the loop part. Got it. I, it feels like the mutation part is, um, not that difficult. It feels like the difficult part is just creating a copy of yourself as step one.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
That seems, uh, um, that seems like one of the greatest inventions in the history of the universe, is the, the f- the first molecule that figured out, "Holy shit, I can create a copy of myself." How hard is that?
- LCLee Cronin
I think it's really, really easy. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, I did not expect that.
- LCLee Cronin
I think it's really, really easy. Well, let's take a step back. I think replication, replicating molecules are rare, but if you say, you know, I think I was saying on, I, I probably got into trouble on Twitter the other day, so I was trying to ... like this. Th- there's about more than 18 mills of water in there, so one mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 mo- m- molecules, that's about the number of stars in the universe, I think, of the order.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
So, there's three universe worth of a- between one and-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, somebody corrected you on Twitter? (laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. (laughs) I'm, as if, I, I'm always being corrected. It's a great fact. But, but there's a lot of molecules in the water.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- LCLee Cronin
And so, and so there's a lot of... 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, so much of the possibilities in the universe are just broken back into atoms. So, you have this, um, this kind of, um, 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, uh, 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, um, would be constructed, big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel, or a icosadodecahedron with 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 the, 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 a absolute accident. And that ring also helps make the small 12 mer. And so you have what's called an autocatalytic set, where A, um, makes B and B helps make A, and, uh, and vice versa, and you then make this loop. So, it's a bit like, um, um, these, they all work in, in synergy to make this chain of events that grow. Um, and it doesn't take, um, 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 you talk about how could a watch somet- some- some- spontaneously emerge. Well, it doesn't. It's a lineage of watches and cruder devices-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
... that, that, that couple, are bootstrapped onto one another.
- LFLex Fridman
Right. Uh, so it's very improbable, but once you get that little discovery, like with the wheel-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- 25:51 – 42:16
Origin of life
- LFLex Fridman
You've tweeted that, quote, "Origin of life research (laughs) is a scam." So if this is Shakespeare, can we analyze this word? Why- why is the origin of life research a scam? Aren't you kind of doing origin of life research?
- LCLee Cronin
Um... Okay, it was tongue-in-cheek, but yeah. I think... And I meant it-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- LCLee Cronin
... um, as tongue-in-cheek. Um, I am, I'm not doing or- I'm not doing the origin of life research. I'm trying to make artificial life.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
Um, and I also want to- to bound the likelihood of ma- of origin of life on earth, but more importantly to find origin of life elsewhere. But le- let me directly address the tweet. There are many, many good-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
... chemists out there doing origin of life research, but I want to nudge them. And I think they're brilliant. Look, th- like, there's no, there's- 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, uh, I could make this particular type of molecule, say this RNA molecule or this pho- uh, uh, phosphodiester or this other molecule, it's gonna 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- 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- 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 I... Let's say there's Country X that has never had a Tesla before, and they get the Tesla.
- LFLex Fridman
Russia.
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs) And they take the Tes- and what they do is they take the Tesla apart and say, "We wanna find the origin of- of cars in the universe," and say, "Okay, how did this form, and how did this form?"
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, I see.
- LCLee Cronin
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- and they say, "Well, that's the root. That's the way- 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 h- horse and carriage.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
And before that maybe, you know, um, where people were using wheels. And- 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 that origin of life chemistry is in danger of- of not making the progress that it deserves, because the chemists are doing this. There's- there's... 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, than the origin of life. You know, why is that? The origin... We understand the origin of life. We're gonna actually work out what life is, and we're gonna be a- bound the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe. And most important for us, we are gonna know or have a good idea of 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- by experimentation. But I th- coming back to the scam, the scam is if we just make this RNA, we've- we've- we've got this-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
... you know, this, uh, 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 gonna be enough? And then, the reason I say this is when you go back to Craig Venter and when he invented his life form, Sindhia, um, this pla- microbe, this- this minimal plasmid. Uh, it's a- is a myoplasma something. I don't know the name of it. But he made this wonderful, um, cell and said, "I've- 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
And he showed when he took out the gene, the- the genes, and put in his genes, synthesized, the cell could boot up.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
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. Um, so there's lots of layers to the scam. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
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 a 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?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, can... Yeah. I think that, um, nobody has made life in the lab from scratch. Lots of people would argue that they have made progress. The Craig Venter, I think the synthesis of a synthetic genome, m- milestone in, in human a- achievement. Brilliant.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. Can we just walk back and s- say what, uh, would you say from your perspective, one of the world experts in exactly this area, what does it mean to create life from scratch? Where if you sit back, whether you do it or somebody else does it, it's like, "Damn. This is... we just created life."
- LCLee Cronin
Um, well, what I would... 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 and, and I-
- LFLex Fridman
Can you explain what sand is? You used a poor-
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. Just inorganic.
- LFLex Fridman
... like.
- LCLee Cronin
Just inorganic stuff. Like n-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, okay.
- LCLee Cronin
Like, like basically just s- so sand is just silica, silicon oxide with some other irons in it, maybe some inorganic carbon, some carbonates. Just basically clearly dead stuff. You, you could just grind rocks into sand and...
- 42:16 – 47:20
Life on Mars
- LCLee Cronin
Probably we were all Martians, probably life got going on Mars, the chemistry on Mars seeded Earth. That might have been a l- a legitimate way to kind of truncate the search space.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
But in the outer solar system we might have completely different life forms, uh, on Enceladus, on Europa, um, and, and Titan, and that would be a cool thing because-
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. (laughs) Did you just say that you think, in terms of likelihood, life started on Mar- like, uh, statistically speaking, life started on Mars and seeded Earth?
- LCLee Cronin
It could be possible because life was li- so Mars was habitable for the type of life that we have right now, type of chemistry, before Earth.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
So it seems to me that l- Mars got searching, doing chemistry, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
And ma-
- LFLex Fridman
So it started way before.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, and so they would have had a few more replicators and some other stuff, and if, if those replicators got ejected from Mars and landed on Earth, and Earth was like, "I don't need-
- LFLex Fridman
Thanks.
- LCLee Cronin
... to start again."
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- LCLee Cronin
Oh, (laughs) thanks for that.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
And then it just carries on. So I- I'm not going, I think there is, that we will find evidence of life on Mars, either life we put there by mistake, (laughs) contamination-
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- LCLee Cronin
... or actually life, the earliest remnants of life, um, and that would be really exciting. That'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-
- LFLex Fridman
Titan and all that, that would be-
- LCLee Cronin
... it-
- LFLex Fridman
... its own thing.
- LCLee Cronin
Exactly.
- LFLex Fridman
Wow, that would be so cool if, uh, we go to Mars and we find life that looks a hell of a lot similar to Earth life.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And then we'll go to, uh, 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.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Some other, some non-RNA type of-
- LCLee Cronin
Or we might find-
- LFLex Fridman
... situation.
- 47:20 – 54:01
Aliens
- LFLex Fridman
how many alien civilizations are out there in those four phases that you're talking about? When you look up at the stars, and you're sipping on some wine, and, um, talking to other people with British accents about something intelligent-
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... intellectual, I'm sure, uh, do you think there's, uh, a lot of alien civilizations looking back at us and wondering the same?
- LCLee Cronin
My romantic view of the universe is really, um, taking loans from my logical self. So what I'm saying is I have no idea, 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, the universe is full of life. And the Fermi, the reason for the Fermi paradox is not that, um, 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 as depicted in Arrival or other, you know, um... I'm just saying that perhaps there are very few universal facts in the universe, (laughs) and that, and maybe, um...... that it's not- it's quite ha- the tech- our technologies are quite divergent and so I think that it's very hard to know how we're gonna interact with alien life.
- LFLex Fridman
You think there's a lot of kinds of life that's possible. I- I guess that was the intuition-
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
...you provided that, uh, the way biology itself, but even this particular kind of biology that we have on earth, uh, is- is something that, uh, is just one sample of, uh, nearly infant number of other possible-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
...complex autonomous self-replicating type of things that could be possible.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And so we're almost unable to see the alternative, uh, versions of us. Huh. I mean, um, we'd still be able to detect them, we'd still be able to interact with them, we'd still be able to- like which, uh, which exactly is lost in translation? Why can't we- why can't we see them, why can't we talk to them? 'cause I- I too have a sense- (laughs) You put it way more poetically. But it seems both statistically and, uh, sort of romantically, it feels like the universe should be teeming with life, like super intelligent life. A- and, uh, I- I just- I s- I sit there and the Fermi paradox is very- is felt very distinctly by me when I look up at the stars because it's like- it- it's, uh, the same way I feel when I'm driving through New Jersey and listening to Bruce Springsteen and feel quite sad. Uh, it's like Louis CK talks about pulling off to the side of the road and just, uh, 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 'cause it feels like they're out there.
- LCLee Cronin
I think that there are a number of answers to that. I think the Fermi paradox is- is perhaps based on the- the assumption that there's- that if life did emerge in the universe, it would be similar to our life and there's only one solution. Um, and I think that what we've got to start to do is go out and d- look for selection, detection rather than an evolution detection, rather than life detection. Um, and I- and I think that once we start to do that, we might start to see really interesting things. Um, and we haven't been doing this for very long, um, and we are living in an expanding universe so that makes the problem a little bit harder. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Everybody's always leaving-
- LCLee Cronin
Um, but I'm- I'm-
- LFLex Fridman
...distance-wise.
- LCLee Cronin
I'm very optimistic that we will- Well, I don't know. There are two movies that came out in a- same- within six months of one another, Ad Astra and Cosmos. Ad Astra, the very expensive blockbuster, you know, with Brad Pitt in it and, um, saying there is no life and it's all, you know, we've got a- w- life on earth has more pressures. 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- (laughs) it- it's a fun film. Um, and but- I really loved those two films and I'm- I- I- and at the same time, those films- at the time those films were coming out, I was working on a paper, um, a life detection paper, and I found it was so hard to publish this paper. And it was almost as depress- I got so depressed trying to get this science out there that I felt the depression o- of, uh, the- the film in Ad Astra, like life is- there's no- no life elsewhere in the universe. And- but I- but I am 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- you made this life on earth, therefore it's- you- you're part of the causal chain of that." And that might be true, but if I can show how r- I- I'm able to do it with, uh, very little cheating or very little information input, just creating like a- a- a model planet, some description, and watching it- watching life emerge, then I think that we will be even to- to persuade even the hardest critic that- that- that it's- 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 gonna be able to do spectroscopy, um, look at colors of exoplanets, I think. Not brilliantly, but we'll be able to start to classify them and we will start to get a real fe- feel for what's going on in the universe on these exoplanets, 'cause it's only in the last few decades, I think, maybe even last decade, that we even, um, um, came to recognize that exoplanets even are common.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
And I think that that gives us a lot of optimism that life is, um, gonna be out there, but I think we have to start framing, um- th- 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, okay. I love the confidence, but, uh, where does the- that confidence come
- 54:01 – 1:00:55
Origin of life continued
- LFLex Fridman
from, you know, chemistry, uh, like how many options does chemistry really have?
- LCLee Cronin
Many. That's the point. And the thing is, this is where the origin of life scam comes in-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
...uh, is that people don't quite count- they 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
Life is contingent. The- 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 life like- other earth-like worlds, we look for the same kind of rocky world. We might look in the same zone as- as- 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- I don't believe in magic, that's why I- I'm sure. I just don't believe in magic. I believe in statistics and I can do experiments." And, 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- that's what I mean ?
- LFLex Fridman
Which aspect of it is not the same?
- LCLee Cronin
Well, I just think it, you- you- it... The... So what is TikTok? TikTok is a- is a mi- social media where people upload videos, right? Of silly videos. So I guess there might be-
- LFLex Fridman
Where there's humor, there's attention, there's-
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... ability to process. There's ability for intelligent organisms to collaborate on ideas and find humor in ideas and play with those ideas, make them viral.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Memes, you know. Uh, humor seems to be kind of fundamental to human experience.
- LCLee Cronin
And I think that, um, 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, uh, the emergence of humor serves a- a- a role in our game engine. And so i- if selection is fundamental in the universe then so is humor (laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
Well, I- I don't- I actually don't know exactly what, uh, role humor serves. Maybe it's like, uh, from a chemical perspective it's, uh, like a catalyst for, uh... I- I guess it serves several purposes. One is a catalyst for spreading ideas on the internet. That's modern humor, but humor is also a good way to deal with, uh, the difficulty of life.
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
It's a kind of valve, release valve for suffering. Like 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, uh, humor is part of how they deal with that.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Because it's usually dark humor, but...
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, it's interesting. I- I don't know exactly sort of the- what- what's the more mathematically general way to formulate what the hell is humor?
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
What humor does it serve? But I- I still... We're kind of joking here, but it's, uh, an- a counterintuitive idea to me to think that, uh, life elsewhere in the universe is very different than life on Earth. And also, like, all of- each instantiation of life is likely very different from each other.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Like, maybe there's a few clusters of similar like life but, uh, it's much more likely, as what you're saying... To me it's a kind of novel thought, I'm not sure what to do with it. But you're saying that there's a- 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. I... It feels like if selection is f- a fundamental kind of directed force in the universe, won't selection result in a- in a few pockets of interesting complexities? I mean, it... Yeah. (sighs) If we ran Earth over again, over and over and over, you're saying it's going to come up with... There- there's not going to be elephants every time?
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, I- I don't think so. I think, uh, and I think that there will be similarities, and I think we know, we don't know enough about how selection is, um, globally works. Um, but it might be, might be that the- the elephant, um, 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- I just don't know enough about c- the contingency, right? The variability. All I do know is you count the number of bits of information required to make an element. Uh, uh, sorry, an elephant, and, and, um, think about the causal chain that provide the- the lineage of eleph- elephants going all the way back to Luca, there's a huge scope for divergence.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, but just like you said with chemistry and selection, the- the things that result in self-replicating chemistry and self-replicating organisms, uh, those are extremely unlikely as you're saying. Uh, but once they're successful, they multiply. So like I- I just... It- it might be a tiny subset of all- 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- or an elephant-like cr- uh, slash human-like creatures.
- LCLee Cronin
Well, there's two different questions. There's the first one, if we were to reset Earth and to start again-
- LFLex Fridman
At the different phases. Sorry to keep interrupting.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, no. If- if we restart Earth and start again, say we could go back- back to beginning and do the experiment or have a number of Earths, um, how similar would biology be? I would say that there would be- there would be broad similarities. But um, but the emergence of mammals is not a given unless we're gonna l- you know, throw an asteroid at each planet each time and- and go try and s- and try and faithfully reproduce what happened. Then there's the other- the other thing about when you go to another la- Earth-like planet elsewhere, maybe there's a different ratio of particular elements, maybe there's, uh, the bom- the bombardment at the beginning of the planet was quicker or longer than Earth and- and- and I just don't have enough information there. What I do know is that, um, the- 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 they will... That- that- that life on Earth that happened again would be same as what we have now.
- 1:00:55 – 1:10:35
Fermi Paradox
- LFLex Fridman
might... That as an explanation from the- for the Fermi paradox that, uh, that means we're not able to interact with them. Or that mean... Tha- that's an explanation for why we haven't at scale heard from aliens is, um...
- LCLee Cronin
... well, right now.
- LFLex Fridman
'Cause they're different than us.
- LCLee Cronin
We've only been looking for, say, 70, 80 years. So I think that we- the reason we have not found aliens yet is that we haven't worked out what life is.
- LFLex Fridman
No, but the aliens have worked that out, surely. Uh, I mean, uh, statistically speaking, they, they must be ha- 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, uh, intellectual evolution that often quickly results in nuclear war and destroys itself, like the, uh, th- there, 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, they already figured it out and why aren't they contacting us? Is it some, some grad student somewhere-
- LCLee Cronin
Well-
- LFLex Fridman
... wants to study a new, a new green planet?
- LCLee Cronin
Maybe, maybe they have. I mean, maybe, um, I mean, I don't, I mean, I don't have a coherent answer to your question other than to say that may- if there are other aliens out there, like, and they're far more advanced, they might be in contact with each other (laughs) and they might also, um, we might be at a point where w- what I'm saying quite critically is it takes two to talk, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- LCLee Cronin
So the aliens might be there but if we are, if we don't have the ability to recognize them and talk to them, then and the aliens aren't going to want to talk to us. And I think that's in a critical point that probably, um, if, if that is a, if that's a filter, there needs to be an ability for one to communicate with the other, and we need to know w- what life is before we do that. So we haven't qualified to even join their club to have a talk.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, I think they still wanna teach us how to talk, right? But-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... my, my worry is that, uh, or I, I think they would wanna teach us how to talk like you do when you meet a, uh, like when you even meet, I, I was gonna say child, but that's a human species, I, I mean like ant, you want to try to communicate with them through whatever devices you can given, given what an ant is like. I just, I worry mostly about that humans are just too close-minded or don't have the right tools.
- LCLee Cronin
You know what, I'm gonna push back on this-
- LFLex Fridman
But, but-
- LCLee Cronin
... 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, and we, that means our description, fundamental description, I'm way out of my pay grade, even further out there.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
But, uh, but I'll say it anyway 'cause I think it's a fun-
- LFLex Fridman
And you don't get paid much anyway, so that-
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... as you said earlier, so... (laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
So, uh, uh, so I would say that we, 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 in, I think that until we understand that, it is gonna limit our ability to even, um, we don't qualify to talk to the aliens. And so I'm gonna say that the, the, they might be there but we just, I'm not gonna say that I believe in m- interdimensional aliens being present in this room.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, but I think you're just being self-critical, uh, like we don't qualify. I think we, I think the fact that we don't qualify qualifies us. We're interesting i- we're interesting in our innocence.
- LCLee Cronin
No, I'm saying that because we don't understand cau- causal chains and the way that information is propagated in the universe-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
... and we don't understand what replication is yet, and we don't understand, um, how life emerged, I think that we would not recognize aliens and they, and if, if someone doesn't recognize you, um, 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? 'Cause you can. There's, uh, just enough cognition. So I'm saying because we don't have enough cogni- our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be, we probably aren't, I mean, communicating with them.
- LFLex Fridman
So you don't agree with the, uh, dating strategy of playing hard to get?
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
'Cause us humans-
- LCLee Cronin
Within, within-
- 1:10:35 – 1:18:56
UFOs
- LFLex Fridman
sightings of weird phenomena that, uh, you know, what does UFO mean? Uh, it means it's, uh, a flying object and it's not identified, uh, clearly at the time of sighting. That's what UFO means. So it could be a physics phenomena, could be ball lightning, could be all kinds of fascinating... I was always fascinated with ball lightning as a, um, as... 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, that really smart people can't explain. I love that. 'Cause it's like, wait a minute. Especially if you can replicate it-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... it's like, wait a minute. How does this happen? That's like the precursor to giant discoveries-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... in chemistry and biology and physics and so on. But, it sucks when those events are super rare, right? Physic- like, like ball lightning. Uh, so, so that's out there, and then, uh, of course, that phenomena could have other interpretations that don't have to do with the physics, the 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. Uh, 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's it's extraterrestrial intelligence. That it's, um, object that's not of this-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... 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?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, (sighs) so I, I agree with you there's a chance. There's always a chance. Any good sci- scientist would have to, or observationist would have to, you know, I want to see if aliens exist, come, come to Earth. What I know about the universe is I think it's unlikely right now that there are aliens visiting us, b- um, but, but not impossible. I think the, um, releases, the dramatization that's been happening politically saying we're gonna release all this information, this, you know, classified information, um, I was kinda disappointed because it was just m- m- very poor, um, um, material. And right now, the, the c- you know, the, the ability to capture high resolution video, everybody is carrying around with them an incredible video device now, uh, a- and we haven't got more compelling data. And so that we've just seeing 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, um-... the, 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, the, I don't think that the, the information out there has convinced me there are any- 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
... and the, 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- to make me go, "Oh, I'm gonna take this seriously." But I'm really interested by the fact that there is this, um, this great deal of interest. And I think that it po- it drives me to maybe want to make a, 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?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. But, but I, see, I almost... Uh, depending on the day, I sometimes agree with you but, uh, w- i- with the thing you just said. But one of the disappointing things to me about the sightings, I still hold the belief that a non-zero number of them (laughs) , uh, is an indication of something very interesting. So, I don't side with the people who say everything could be explained with, like, uh, sensor artifacts kind of thing.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. I, I'd agree with you. I didn't say that either. I would say I just don't have enough data.
- LFLex Fridman
Right. But the thing I wanna push back on is, is the statement that everybody has a high-definition camera. One of the disappointing things to me about, like, the report that the government released, but in general, just having worked with government, having worked with, with people all over, uh, is how in- incompetent we are. Like, if you look at the pan- 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 with our 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 phenomena out there, of which extraterrestrial intelligence visiting Earth could be one. I don't think we have, I don't think everybody having a s- a, 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, be in the right moment, in the right time to be able to capture the thing.
- LCLee Cronin
I agree. I agree. Let me, let me rephrase what I think on this. I, I haven't seen enough information, I haven't really actively sought it out, I m- I must admit. But I'm, I'm with you and I love the idea of anomaly detection, in chemistry in particular, right? I want to make anomalies. Sorry, or not necessarily make anomalies. I want to understand an anomaly. Yeah. Let me give you two from chemistry, um, which are really quite interesting. Um, phlogiston, going way back, where people said, "There's this thing called phlogiston." And for ages, the alchemists got really, um, this kind of, the, this, the fire is the thing. Um, and that's one. And then we determined that phlogiston wasn't what we thought it is. Let's go to physics, the aether. The aether's a hard one because I think actually the aether might exist, and I'll tell you what I think the aether is later. Um, and it, and, and it, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
Wait, can you explain aether? Uh-
- LCLee Cronin
So as, as the vacuum, so it's the, the light traveling through the aether in the vacuum.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
There is some thing that we call the aether that, that basically mediates the, the movement of light.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- LCLee Cronin
So y- and I think that, um, and then the other one is cold fusion, which is more of a ... so a few years ago, um, that, that people observed it when they did some electrochemistry when they were hi- uh, uh, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, that you could, got more energy out than you put in. And people got excited to, and they thought that this was a nuclear reaction. And, um, and in the end it was kind of discredited because you didn't detect neutrons and all the stuff. But I'm pretty sure ... I'm a chemist, I'm going, 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. So all I'm saying, in your response about aliens, is that we d- we lack the experimental design to really capture these anomalies, and we are in-cir- encircling the planet with many more detection systems. We've got satellites everywhere. So there is, I do hope, that we are gonna discover more anomalies. Remember, the, the solar system isn't just static in space, it's moving through the universe. So there's just more and more chance. I'm not, what with Avi Loeb that, uh, uh, and he's generating all sorts of, kind of, um, o- a cult, I would say-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
... uh, uh, with this. But there, but I'm not against him. I think there is a finite chance if there are aliens in the universe that we're gonna happen upon them because we're moving through the universe.
- 1:18:56 – 1:24:59
Science and authority
- LCLee Cronin
- LFLex Fridman
What's the nature of th- uh, of the following that, uh, Avi Loeb has that-
- LCLee Cronin
He's kind- 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. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
I see.
- LCLee Cronin
He's obviously bored. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Yeah.
- LCLee Cronin
Or, or, or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand, and he's, and, you know, he's playfully kind of trying to interact with society and his peers to say, "Stop saying it's not possible." And which I agree with, we shouldn't do that, but we should frame it statistically in the same way we f- should frame anyth- everything as good scientists, st- statistically.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.... good scientists recently. The idea of good scientists is, um, I take quite skeptically. I've been listening to a lot of scientists telling me about what is good, uh, wha- wha- what is good science.
- LCLee Cronin
That makes me sad because you've been interviewing, uh, what I would consider a lot of really good scientists-
- LFLex Fridman
No, that's true.
- LCLee Cronin
... a lot of great thinkers and-
- LFLex Fridman
And, but th- that's exactly right. And most of the people I talk to are incredible human beings, but there's a humility that's required.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Science is not, um, science cannot be dogmatism. Uh-
- LCLee Cronin
Sure, I agree. I mean-
- LFLex Fridman
And authority, like, um, 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 clueless as everybody else, but you're more curious and more stubborn.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So that's, uh, that's a nice quality to have. But overall just, um, y- using the word science and statistics can often, uh, as, as you know, kind of, um, become a catalyst for dismissing, uh, new ideas, out of the box ideas, uh, wild ideas, all that kind of stuff.
- LCLee Cronin
Well, yes and no. I think that, so I'm, I like to, uh, some people find me extremely annoying in science because I'm basically, um,, I'm quite rude and disruptive. Not in a rude, you know, it's not up to people and say they're ugly or stupid or anything like that.
Episode duration: 4:05:50
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