EVERY SPOKEN WORD
100 min read · 20,138 words- 0:00 – 0:53
Intro
- LCLee Cronin
There's almost like a new force in the universe, that selection drives complexification such to the point where systems can become self-governing, self-referencing. And when an object cares about its own existence in time, it's on the way to life. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
Am I right in thinking that you're in Scotland now?
- LCLee Cronin
Yep, I'm in Glasgow.
- CWChris Williamson
Given the fact that we might be talking a lot about adaptation in this conversation, how have you adapted to understanding the accents of everybody that's around you in Glasgow? Did that take time?
- LCLee Cronin
I, I'm still struggling. I think the thing that I'm getting better at though is being water repellent.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah.
- LCLee Cronin
Because it's so rainy. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Well, as someone that's from the Northeast of England, I feel your pain.
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's a, it's a strange, it's a strange climate up there.
- 0:53 – 4:31
The Universe’s Memory
- CWChris Williamson
What does "Life is the universe developing a memory" mean?
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs) I'm not sure I know now. It seemed like a good phrase at the time. No, um, I think it's the m- simplest way I can describe the process by soulless matter or stuff that's not directed, is able literally to act on other stuff by experiencing stuff in stuff. Now, that sounds a bit weird-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
... but I can unpack that because it's kind of interesting in that, um, um, I think that I realized in the last few months that there is this transition f- to kind of from sand, if you like, all the way to cells, but actually via kind of functional objects. And if you think of sand on the beach, and the sand has no memory so the wind is just blowing it around and, you know, maybe water's coming in. But maybe every now and then some clumps of sand, maybe that some clumps of sand get bro- blown together in a triangle and they become resistant to weathering from either side, and that triangle wi- is able to kind of remain, exist for time. And if that triangle can have a material effect on other sand next door and that carries on, you can see maybe how the triangle that could literally make lots of triangles. And so that, in a way, is like a little rudimentary memory because the effect of that, that chance arrangement has a material, um, influence on the future. And so it's those little bit, little things that occur in the universe able to then, um, remember that by physically building things, I think what I mean. Um, as opposed to say, um, I don't know, you know, if you've got a flame and you burn things, you lose... They're all, the, the, the material that came before is destroyed and no longer exists, so it has harder time to have an influence on the future. And I suppose it's literally meaning that the past has an effect on the future because of the state of the past, like, you know, what the shape of the object is. So that's really what I mean, is that the past really does have a meaning, which is obvious probably to us, but not to physicists who basically think the past doesn't exist.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. I learned about slime molds a couple of weeks ago and they... I, I'm aware that, that we're jumping ahead and we're getting into something that is definitely life, but they kind of have a memory thing, right? They leave, uh, hormones or they secrete pheromones and leave them around, and then-
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... when they go back they can know not to go to this particular place. This is a mold.
- LCLee Cronin
Yep. Yeah, yeah. Mm-
- CWChris Williamson
They can train them to go through mazes and shit.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, exactly. I mean, slime molds are really good at doing that. Bacteria are able to communicate via that. So it's all this kind of, this idea there's constraints, 'cause the thing about... The problem with life, the difference between life and non-life, you know when you've got life like a slime mold or sand, right? If someone said, "Here's some sand, here's some slime mold. Can you tell the difference?" Most people would be able to tell the difference. But that's that, that jump that you need to go through to get from sand to slime mold that people really had trouble with, and I think, um, this understanding that the universe is kind of life is the process by which the universe not only, um, has memories, but starts to initiate the process of recording those memories and making them more and more sophisticated so we're able to go to abstraction. So yeah, the p- the going from sand to super intelligence is actually a fairly obvious thing that should happen in the universe, believe it or not.
- 4:31 – 12:52
Transitioning to Being Alive
- LCLee Cronin
- CWChris Williamson
What is the most difficult step, as far as you can see, from something which is completely not alive to something which is maybe as alive as alive can be? Is it the, uh, origin of life? Is it going from single cell to multicellular organism? Is it not destroying itself with global warming? Where along that spectrum can you see the biggest great filters?
- LCLee Cronin
Oh, I think I can think of three or four really interesting transitions. The way to put, put it, and so the first one is like, let's create a first transition is from the random to the... so the kind of physical world where statistics rules and particles are everywhere to the kind of chemical world where things are a little bit less random 'cause there's little bits of memory bonds. You know, you can have... You can cut diamonds that have faces and so on, so they have features. So you go... So that, so that distribution narrows slightly. So it's kind o'-
- CWChris Williamson
What would be... Sorry, what would be an example of the first type?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, just, um, I suppose a very basic particle, say hydrogen gas moving around, right? Gravity would tend to bring it together so you clump together and you build a star. Okay? But then when you go to... So you got this transition from... in physics and chemistry to then biology.... biology, so let's say physics is just statistical, pfft, mess, but Gaussian mess. Biology is also a mess, but biology is quite good at reproducing almost the same features, so if you have a twin or you have some identical cells, they'd be different but you could see that they were the same thing, or that, or a couple of cats. So, but they wouldn't be, like, just random mess, you know, there'd be a narrow distribution, you'll identify other cats. And then if you go from cats to the iPhone, several iPhones, and you look inside the iPhones, the iPhones would be pretty much identical. Same PCB, same, um, um, kind of transistors if they're the same type. So the distribution would narrow almost to a thin line. So you have broad distribution, kind of random one, narrower one for biology, and a thin line for technology. So what is really interesting is that transition from kind of a random distribution to a less random distribution for biology, which is evidence of evolution, and then evolution to, to technology. So you're saying what is the hardest jump? Well, I think the hardest jump is basically, um, because we don't yet understand the force, if you like, that ablest, uh, to initiate evolution, everyone thinks that evolution is something that only exists in life. But if that's the case, where did the life come from? And you have this proverbial... I think it's not impossible to understand how you go from a single cell to multi-cell. Hard but not impossible. Not impossible then to go from multi-cell to animal, and then animal tool-making to, to consciousness and stuff. But, so that first jump from the sand to the cell, the molecular machines, is something we have no handle on because it occurs in the molecular regime, and so this is where the chemists need to be doing their detective work. So I think that we should nail it soon, but it is fascinating that we have no idea what happened. None.
- CWChris Williamson
That's the cur- that's the current state of the origin of life research, is that we have no idea how it happened?
- LCLee Cronin
I, I mean, I think I have an idea but that's because I'm bi, you know, I'm biased. I'm doing experiments. I have an inkling. I think, I feel like I'm the first to a party, like the electricians, when people were inventing electricity and you had all these arguments between the voltas and the ampers and people, some people thought electricity was a liquid, some people thought it was... You know, they didn't really know because there was static electricity, so people's hair standing on end. There were batteries and there was this, there was this paradigm where no one knew, it was a free-for-all. So, and not every- no one was completely right and no one was completely wrong. There's a spectrum. And I think right now we have what we call prebiotic chemists who basically retro, go back and just try and recreate the events. We have biologists who say, "Ah, chemistry is easy. We'll just get to genes and go from there." And then you have, um, people who are trying to understand the origin story to say, well, we need to kind of let go of life on Earth as being the only thing and say, "What general process gave rise to life?" And I'm probably the first in a new discipline of people that are willing to say that this is an answerable question. And in fact I have experiments running in my lab right now literally just shaking sha- sand in a box hoping for slime mold to come out or maybe something a little bit less scary than slime mold, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) You're shaking-
- LCLee Cronin
It's true.
- CWChris Williamson
... you're shaking sand in a box to just see what-
- LCLee Cronin
Literally.
- CWChris Williamson
... see what happens?
- LCLee Cronin
Literally. I mean, it's a bit more chemically sophisticated so it probably would have some water, and in that water we'd have some inorganic minerals, some rocks, and those rocks kind of act like, you know, the beginnings of... If you can etch a rock and have a little cave in it or a, or a chance crack, that crack becomes a place where a memory can be born because that crack maybe can trap some molecules and those molecules will be given safe harbor from the environment so those molecules can basically react with each other to make another molecule. And if they come together, you'll keep building, um, more and more possibilities to explore chemical space. And then in chemical space there are some special molecules called replicators which only occur very rarely, but those molecules are able literally to fabricate each other. Or even better, fabricate each other in, in groups, so it's almost like imagining having a, you know, if you have someone fabricating a table and a chair, um, like a carpenter, you would imagine that the table fabricates part of the chair, and the chair fabricates part of the table, and together the table-chair exists as an entity and that's how the, the thing bec- evolves, because it doesn't need the carpenter. They, they, they... It's a symbiotic relationship. And that's the thing that we're searching for in the sand shaker in my lab.
- CWChris Williamson
Why would it be sand with water given the fact that life is carbon-based?
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, good point. So because, um, I mean carbon's just a, a, a u- a useful, it's a useful element because it can make a large number of, um, um, strong interactions. So the reason why pla- you know, if you take plastic and flex it and bend it and so on, that, that's all based on, based on carbon, and carbon has that property to make what we call polymers, and those polymers are really versatile. Um, and so on planet Earth the carbon was in the form of methane and probably carbon dioxide, the simplest forms of carbon, and then what happened, there was a load of, you know, there was, um, obviously hot rock coming out from the center of the Earth and there was water probably, and the methane would probably start to form tar. Reactive oxygen formed tar, sugars. Not living sugars, just really, really terrible, gooey, black tar. The CO2 would also react.... and so these polymerization reactions would happen, but they would happen in the sand, and the sand would act as like a catalyst or a controller to basically, you know, um, direct the outcome of those reactions. So literally, my lab is like a load of, um, uh, methane, carbon dioxide, and a load of sand being heated up. It's a kind of messy pile of junk.
- CWChris Williamson
And sha- is there a machine, a little automated mm- machine sifter-
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, the stirring, we-
- CWChris Williamson
... that's just wiggling boxes?
- LCLee Cronin
We can do shaking, but we do stirring. We have networks and the way to... we have like basically, it looks like a, um, um, a- a- a load of different test tubes, so maybe say a rack of test tubes or two racks, but they wouldn't be isolated. They would be connected like a network, so we kind of make the chemical internet. So what we could do is we could transfer the contents of one test tube to another to seed all the different test tubes. So we literally take... r- really spread all the material around for maximum searching of the chemical space.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 12:52 – 20:52
Defining Life
- CWChris Williamson
So how do you define life? What's the difference between life and not life?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, physically no idea, um, because every- I...
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
In fact I, I would say, I mean, I'm being facetious in a way, but I think it's really important. I think that, um, I will, well, I would now contradict that and say of course this is a definition of life. In matter, if you take a s- let's say if I take a snapshot of you, frozen in time, you would be as dead as a rock, right? I've seen, and I take the same sh- snapshot, I would not have been able to know you're alive. So, so it's not just the stuff in you, right? Uh, you know, if you shed a tear, the water came from a living eye, but the water doesn't have any emotion. There's just water, maybe some salt in it or something. So people get really stuck thinking that life, they have to kind of say life has these properties of, you know, you've got a metabolism, you've got all this stuff and whatever, and I think that's far too hard because you end up having to take a survey, focus group, you know, "Hello, alien, can you please fo- tick these following questions. If you say yes to most of them, you'll be alive." You know, "Do you respire? Yes. Do you a- do you evolve? Do you metabolize? Yeah." D- d- d- do... and so, and now they've got it stuff, it's, it's kind of, it got really stuck because if you say to COVID-19, "Is COVID-19 alive as a virus particle?" Most people will say, "No, viruses are dead." Like, well, okay, good, no problem, no pandemic. Well, of course, that's incorrect. When a virus particle gets into your cell, it hijacks the cell, gets its nuclear material replicated, makes lots of copies of itself, leaves the cell, goes around, and can carry... that's its life cycle. So um, a friend of mine, um, who, uh, uh, kind of was the last person to touch the Hubble, he's a astronaut. I tried to convince him of this, about life, difference of life. So I said, "There's no difference between him, the astronaut, and a virus particle, except when he's in space, he's like a virus particle. He can't have children. When his oxy- you know, his, his, when his oxygen runs out and everything runs out, he's gonna be a dead astronaut. He has to come back to Earth, and on Earth, he's able to breathe, have kids or look after his kids, whatever, do stuff." So the current notion of life that we have is not appropriate. So now I ask a, say the, I ask a different question to "Is something alive?" is to say, "Okay, let me, you know, take you or an object," and you say, "Right, is this a product of a living system?" And then w- uh, or evolution, and I have a way of telling, giving you an answer to that question without, um, with almost 100% accuracy. And so what I define life as, life is a process that can build objects that cannot form in a random environment. So I'll say that again. Life is characterized by the ability to build stuff in abundance that can't form by random chance. So you can think about DNA and proteins and cells, but you could also think about this mouse. This mouse, if we go to PC World and buy 10 of these mice, it's a Microsoft mouse, it's probably okay. If you found 10 of these mice on Mars, you wouldn't say, "Oh my God, it's a random rock." You'd be like, "That's weird. There's 10 electronic things that look like a mouse I- I found back on Earth. They're identical. This must be proof that life has been here." It might have dumped the mouse- mice off and ran away, but those objects, they don't need to be alive themselves, but they are a readout on life. So I think don't ask if you're alive. Ask if you can leave artifacts that prove to other people who follow your trail that you were alive. When you do that, that's so liberating because then you see flame isn't alive. The spot on Jupiter is not alive. Clouds aren't alive. But if you found, you know, 10 identical clouds in the sky with lots of features, you would know they weren't clouds. That was an evidence of life in the atmosphere.
- CWChris Williamson
So you're not saying that the mouse is alive. What you're saying is that something which seems to present a highly ordered environment that couldn't come together by chance is either life or an artifact that sh- shows that life was there.
- LCLee Cronin
Exactly. That's it.
- CWChris Williamson
So this is, this is intrinsically related to time and entropy in that case.
- LCLee Cronin
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
How? How? Why?
- LCLee Cronin
Yes, yes. (laughs) Well, you might know that I'm not a really a, a lover of entropy or... uh, well, you can choose one or the other, right? You can choose entropy or choose time. And so what I mean by that is that because we live in a universe that physicists think that time does not exist, we have to have this thing called entropy. And so what that means is that, um, e- in any, i- the universe's entropy is expanding, which is another way of saying the universe is asymmetric in this time. So entropy is just this...... is kind of a nons- it's actually a kind of nonsense term. I, and I feel bad for Boltzmann because I'm a chemist. I love setting fire to stuff, right? And I'm not saying that, that the second law of thermodynamics is a falsehood. I'm saying that the second law of thermodynamics is a misrepresentation of how the universe works. So lots of people think the universe is going to end in heat death. I don't think that's necessarily guaranteed.
- CWChris Williamson
Why?
- LCLee Cronin
Because I think the universe is going to basically end up just keep building stuff. Who's ... There, I think there's a series of ratchets and humanity, humanity's been doing it. Technology ratchets, and what happens is that basically, we take all the available energy and resource and by abstraction, we build machines that can then harness more energy and resource, more sophistication. We go up and up and up and up and up and up and up. And I don't think there needs to be a heat death. We can regather those. Now, that means that actually there's something very interesting about what we mean by spontaneous, uh, processes and entropy over time. But I'm not saying that time doesn't exist. Time must exist and because time exists, the universe expands, and because the universe expands, there's more space over which you spread stuff out, which is what the second law in entropy says. But that doesn't necessarily say that everything has to spread out and die, right? There needs to be enough resource to get there. But, uh, we just don't know enough about it and I like to poke, poke the physicists, but I don't want to go too far because, um, entropy is a useful, uh, measure of, uh, of labeling or if you look at two ... If you, if I give you some s- snapshot of a room, let's say my office here, and I put some neon gas in my room. Oh no, let's say some radon gas, so I wouldn't want to be here because it'd be radioactive, but I have some goggles and I could see the radioactivity and I put in a plume of radon gas in one corner of the room, it'd look like Ghostbusters, you have green plume, right? So what would happen, that would be at T equals zero, what would you predict would happen at T equals one hour? Well then, the radon gas would spread out uniformly in the room and you'd kind of have this green haze. So you would basically, when I give you those two photographs, which is the beginning and which is the end? You would look at it and go, "Oh, that's the beginning and the end." You would assign that. You would label it. And so the funny thing about that is that, um, you have to be the labeler, but you could somehow take all those molecules and if you flick all those molecules back, you could push them back into the corner. You would do work on them and that work would be against the second law, it takes some energy and, you know, that, that's all kind of accounted for. So I'm not saying they are perpetual motion machines, but I'm saying that probably the energy of the universe is not constant. The energy of the universe is increasing, and that energy of the universe increasing is because of time, and that's what dark energy is. The mismatch in dark energy in the universe is not dark energy, it's just
- 20:52 – 28:45
The Energy of the Universe
- LCLee Cronin
evidence of time. I think.
- CWChris Williamson
Go into that for me.
- LCLee Cronin
So there are two things in the universe we don't understand. There's dark matter, um, what that means, if you look at all the galaxies right now and you look, calculate the, um, you look at the size of the galaxy and the rotation and the fact there's a compact mass, if you do calculations with gravity, um, sorry, you do calculations of that observable mass and you look at the structure of the galaxy, the galaxy should not be holding together. It should be flying apart. So some of the mass is missing. So the physicists said, "Well, we can't see it. Let's just call it dark matter and there's stuff in there." I think that's... Okay. There could be a hint there's something wrong with gravity, but I think most physicists are of the, uh, uh, uh, fairly comfortable with the fact there's some non-luminescent stuff that's in the galaxy called dark matter. Gravity attracts together, galaxy is lovely and fine. So that's dark matter. Let's not worry about that. But there's this other thing called dark energy that we need to somehow understand the rate of expansion of the universe and to balance things out, and we just don't know what that is or where it comes from. My wild idea is that the amount of dark energy in the universe was zero, at T equals zero, because there was no time, and as the universe increases, the energy in, uh, expands in time, the energy of the universe increases because of the energy associated with space. And because time came first and produced space, the energy associated with space is just inflating. So it's almost like the singularity at the beginning is pulling energy from non-space, which seems really weird, but that is really weird, and inflating into space. And we're actually measuring that. Evidence of that is, is dark energy.
- CWChris Williamson
How do the physicists feel about this idea?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, they just don't talk to me about that. They, they just ignore it. I think because they, they are... For some reason, time ha- isn't emerged... They have to... Well, (laughs) they, what they feel about it is they just think I'm talking complete nonsense, truth be told. Some physicists who think that there's, the... But they're... Well, no, actually, not entirely. Let's, let's be fair. They are confused because I'm unable to give a precisely defendable, um, theory around that. But what I say is like, well, for the universe to have an origin, what we have right now, the universe must have had lots of order at the beginning. Everyone agrees this entropy that we've got, you know, this order at the beginning is allowing us to run down the clock of the universe. So if the physicists are right and entropy is expanding, increasing with the universe, that we've... Something put that order there at the beginning. And that means the initial conditions of the universe were set. That means, what happens to the universe actually is pre- controlled by the initial conditions. That you're, all the questions you're going to ask me today were not decided by you in the last few hours or by you doing some research, but by the universe at the beginning. So, you know, the first photon that came into existence and then under broke symmetry breaking, so that all happened. That's clearly nonsense.... and, um, and the reason why that's clearly nonsense is there's no... there wasn't the information capability in the universe there, so the, that means there's something wrong when you're saying the initial conditions prescribe all the future because they couldn't barely... they could barely prescribe the next moment. So, actually, the physicists are in a trap in that, um, the origin of the universe requires order and if you give that, then you can get right to the second law, time is emergent, causation is emergent, but you have to predict, get this order from somewhere. So, and then you have to make these four beliefs. Um, so order at the beginning, time is emergent, causation is emergent, second law. If I just say there's time (laughs) and, and it's asymmetric, you don't need those four beliefs because, uh, the second law's obvious. You don't need it. You don't need order to be in the past 'cause there's just time going forward. There's always gonna be more disorder or a larger space from which to spread out your, your, your matter in the future. So, all that breaks down, but that requires... the physicist has to give up the initial conditions, and that's really hard.
- CWChris Williamson
I can't imagine why they don't want to play with you given the fact that you're curling one out in the middle of their lovely very well-established set of rules and (laughs) procedures that everything's been based upon.
- LCLee Cronin
Well, I mean, I do think that their... the standard model and the Newtonian dynamics we've got, and the Einsteinian dynamics are pretty damn good. Pretty damn good. Planes, trains, automobiles, go to the moon, making transistors. So physicists have got strong... you know, it works. However, it doesn't predict life and novelty and creativity, and the fact that we realize there's something wrong with our universe is the fact that human beings are able to be creative and almost think beyond the edge of the universe. When you have a creative thought, that thought is almost existing beyond the edge of the known, and then you can take that thought and actualize it in the known universe. It's kind of insane.
- CWChris Williamson
But you're going, you're going to come up against physical real restrictions. You can think things that you can't do.
- LCLee Cronin
Sure, but you can also think things that you can then have a material impact in the universe, that unless you thought of them, they wouldn't have happened. So SpaceX, Elon Musk deciding to land a rocket on legs, someone invented that in their head, and they allow... now rockets land on legs.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. I have in my, uh, Twitter bio, "locally reversing entropy" as a, a little tagline. It's been there for ages. I heard it in a podcast years ago. And, um, that... it, it kind of is one of those. I- is that, is that an accurate statement to say that human beings and life does locally reverse entropy?
- LCLee Cronin
Y- y- yes. I think it's more than that. I think what you're... what that is a marker. That's a, a very nice way of saying gently, um, that the causation and memory in the universe is a thing. (laughs) And what, what you're able to do by locally... so the thing... let's think about the thought experiment. So what you can do when people think about reversibility and you say, "Right, we're gonna do an experiment. Let's, let's imagine, um, a universe without time," but hang on, you have to stop. It requires time to do that. It's kind of insane that the... to, to have... to imagine a time where there is no time, you have to stop, and time goes by. It's kind of insane. And it's almost like saying, "Right, let's imagine a universe in which all the prime numbers are available." Okay, tell me the... all the prime numbers available, but you don't need that. You need a resource called time to actually mine the prime numbers. So the existence of ever-increasing prime numbers is evidence that time exists. The fact that I can't steal money from your bank account, well, not that I would try, but let's say I were to just... uh, by breaking your encryption key is evidence that time exists. So 'cause physicists will all be rich otherwise, so this locally reversing entropy is a bit a... bit about saying, "Well, we need to do work on our environment. By doing work, we can position objects where we want them to be, which fights disorder. We set the initial conditions, we can make objects and so on." And that's kind of, um, the way that I started to build assembly theory, um, which is from controlling those initial conditions and causation. Uh, and I just think that, you know, I think that entropy hasn't really done very much for us. It should have done more.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) I like that idea.
- 28:45 – 35:20
Where did Life Originate?
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so going back to what you touched on earlier on about the origins of life, you have an inkling you're the first guy at the party. Is it tar and primitive sugars or what's going on? What do you think?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, so going to the origin of life I think is a really important question. I think it goes beyond that. What I'm trying to do in my lab, not just in my lab, but collaborators in, in the US and, and Germany and, and all around the world, so lots of people coming to the pie at the same time, but there's a physicist I'm working wi- with at ASU who's... we're kind of on the same page there. Um, and what we think is happening is that selection, the process of selection, making memories can occur before biology and life, and selection occurs in stuff. Where there's, where there's just any physical stuff, selection can start. And so what that allows us to understand is that selection in matter predates biology by a long way, and that starts to weave those memories, and over time, molecular machines get built. And those molecular machines are recruited by the available chemistry you have on Earth. So the origin of life is about inventing selection, I think, and selection comes before biology. And that's what our inkling is. And so on Earth...... that leads to carbon-based life. But I think elsewhere, there's gonna be loads of other possibilities. So, I think that we want to understand how selection predates evolution, and I think that we've come up with... we understand there's almost, like, a new force in the universe, that selection drives complexification such to the point where systems can be... this is a... I don't like this phrase, but I'll use it anyway, become self-governing, self-referencing. And when an object cares about its own existence in time, it's on the way to life. Because you have a number of ways existing. If you're a rock, you just sit there and do nothing, and you're ca-... made of hard stuff, but if you're sand, you'll get blown away and broken up all the time. And the fact that we exist, you know, the meaning of life is li- like "existence". Literally just one word. (laughs) Existence through adversity. Because, you know, because there's weathering and so on, selection allows you to build repair mechanisms. So, what we're doing in the lab is we're building experiments from the inorganic world that go select, go and undergo selection. In this case they work with organic molecules, and they start to produce molecules that will turn into a kind of biology. But I'm pretty sure the biology we have on earth, the life we have on earth, is unique to earth. There is no other biology in the entire universe. And if we... what I mean by biology, I mean proteins and DNA and the specific nature of the stuff. But life is everywhere, and I think that life is likely to be as common as, you know, th- stars, and-
- CWChris Williamson
S-... Hang on. So, life on earth is completely unique, but life in the universe is widespread.
- LCLee Cronin
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
So, the... Your view, it seems, is we have very myopic understanding of what life consists of because we're only looking at carbon-based, this particular atmosphere, has to respirate, has to do the sex thing to make more of itself and replicate, and stuff like that. And your view is much broader than that, that there are essentially as many ways to create life as there are potentially planets to have life on?
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. Um, and I think there will be commonalities, like in stars. Just some... I'd like to... If you took, take our star at the center of our solar system, if you just... Like, if we just pretended we couldn't see any other stars in the sky, there was just one star, we would probably look up in the sky and look at the star and obsess about, "How did it form? What were the conditions that made it?" And all that stuff, and obsess, obsess, obsess. Now the shroud has been taken, um, taken, and we can classify stars everywhere, you know, by the luminosity and their size and so on, and their spectrum, that we know that basically there's a whole statistical distribution of stars in which our sun is one of those. And I, I wonder when we... if we could, I don't know if we ever will be able to survey life in the universe, that we'll see life like that. And then, it's kind of cool to think about that because what I would like to do is convince NASA and, uh, ESA, say, "Well, look, with telescopes like JWST, we should try and look for... survey stars and planets, and try and look for planets that may be other s-... rocky planets, similar conditions, similar mass." Why? Because we know that life like us, uh, that works on the second to hour to day timescale exists there, and that's might... why we might be our best chance of identifying aliens, because probably life can exist anywhere, but is the timescale right for us to talk to? Is the chemistry right for us to recognize? You know, there's so many variables, so contingent, that it's gonna be really hard to understand.
- CWChris Williamson
What are some of the commonalities that you're going to see between all life?
- LCLee Cronin
Um, I-
- CWChris Williamson
Between most life, should I say?
- LCLee Cronin
I would guess, and this is just guess because we've just got life on earth, that evolution would be common, because selection and evolution go together, so you'll have an entire ecosystem where they'll be lots of lifeform, different lifeforms, sharing common machinery. So, that'd be one thing. I would think that probably the ability to have some kind of computing so-... not computing device, some kind of information processing device, some sensors, maybe, depending on the, on the mass of the planet. Imagine, you know, can you imagine if, um, life started on a planet where the gravity was less strong, we might not have needed to wait so long to get to multicellular life form, 'cause one of the reasons why it took so long is we needed to develop oxo- oxygen metabolism. Oxygen metabolism took ages to develop. It could be that-
- CWChris Williamson
Why do we need that because of gravity?
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah, because the gravity was strong, oxygen gives you more energy, just really super boosts.
- CWChris Williamson
Just fighting against earth.
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah. So if the gravity, gravitational strength was less, mayb-... so maybe gla- um, maybe earth is at the bottom of the class in IQ, 'cause it took so long to get intelligent.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. And on a planet that didn't have as much gravity, the organisms would be able to grow more quickly, which means that they would be able to become more sophisticated more quickly, and they'd be able to develop and become a-
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... Type III civilization. Okay, that's interesting. What
- 35:20 – 40:37
Other Forms of Exotic Life
- CWChris Williamson
about other exotic forms of life? So, I, I watch a, a channel called Melody Sheep. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of it. Dude, you would adore this YouTube channel. So, these guys make, uh, documentaries on YouTube, about one every year to year and a half, and they're usually between 30 and 60 minutes long. The whole thing's beautifully soundscaped and rendered in 3D. It's unf-... Really, it looks like it should be on Netflix. And they've done, I think, a three-part or a four-part series which is, um, looking at different ways that life could have evolved on other planets. What would have happened if it was very high gravity? What would have happened if the atmosphere was unbelievably more dense? And you can have these creatures that are kind of like whales but they surf through the air. Uh, and then they moved on to some what they called very exotic types of alien life, and one of the ones that they mentioned, which is why I brought it up with the sand earlier on, is silicon-based life. They said that if you had silicon-based life, metabolisms could be so slow that thoughts might take millions of years, and this is my only...... tangential, uh, (laughs) bit of consumption apart from your work that I've had into this world. So, can we have silicon life? What other exotic types of life are there and can thoughts take a million years?
- LCLee Cronin
Well, I think a thought can take as long as it needs, as long as the environment doesn't change such that you break registry. So, millions of years? I don't know. I- I'm gonna watch this YouTube ch- channel. Thanks for the tip.
- CWChris Williamson
I think you'll absolutely love it, man. It's so good.
- LCLee Cronin
I think it- I think that y- thoughts could take, m- let's say days, 'cause I think, you know, silicon is... And actually, silicon might be faster 'cause silicon can move electrons around. You know, we might have diamond brain. There might be aliens with diamond brains, right? So dia- or graphene brains because what you can have is you can have car- highly ordered carbon and have these networks, and if you dope the networks, it might be such that you can just basically say, "Here's a big diamond. We'll use that as an information storage medium." And wherever we break, we have dangling bonds and diamonds or defects that can be, you know... I'm just making stuff up. So, the, the problem that we have imagining silicon life is that silicon requires high pressure, high temperature, all this stuff to happen, um, but I, I don't know what the, the life- the, the, the lifespan would be. If you're talking about millions of years, well that's- we could do the math. Humanity's been around for a few 100,000 years thinking, and so if we... And the universe has been here for about 13.7 billion years, so it's, you know, 1,300- 1,370 million years. So, mm, probably not, because we won't have had many thoughts since the beginning of the universe.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, I understand. Okay, what other exotic forms of life have you considered that there might be out there?
- LCLee Cronin
Oh, I think silicon's a good one. I think on Venus, we might have complex chemistry getting to there. I think that there might be different forms of life on Titan and Europa on C- based on carbon, but completely different, weird stuff, because it's liquid alkanes, very cold. So you'll, so the type of chemistry you've got available is not gonna be as rich as you have on Earth because you won't have the, you know, the set of compounds. But really, um, the periodic table's pretty big, but what I think you're gonna see is that when stars form, they undergo few- they under-... We know that stars go through a fairly normal kind of life cycle. So they undergo fission, they keep building up elements and complexity, so more and more heavier, and then the star explodes. Then that material accretes and then what happens is the heavier stuff goes to the center and you get fractionation. So I think that most planets will present, rocky planets will present with, you know, iron and nickel core, lighter elements on the outside. So I'm, I'm, I think exotic life will be very kind of exotic, but not completely outrageous. I don't know if you know the book by Andy Weir, The, The Hail Mary.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yeah, where he has that creature. What's it made of?
- LCLee Cronin
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
What's that, what's it made of?
- LCLee Cronin
So it's made of, so mercury blood, but bi- bi- kind of biological, but kind of inorganic and hot temperatures. Quite a cool... I like, I like the, the, uh, rese- research gone into that. So I'm not sure I could buy that a life form would have a mercury blood 'cause that's really heavy and really, like, okay, you'd have to have a lot of mercury. But, but it is avai- readily available liquid, right? Under a var- large variety of conditions. But I think, to be honest with you, we simply don't know and I'm a chemist existing on planet Earth, one atmosphere, 25 degrees Celsius liquid water. Imagine what a chemist on Jupiter would look like under several million pascals of pressure where hydrogen li- hydrogen is not only a liquid, it becomes a metal, and it conducts electrons, right? So it's, like, super interesting. So I would just say, no, I wouldn't have a bet on- against anything, but I would bet that you would need to be able to measure the complexity of the object using the kind of d- the way I discussed earlier, looking for artifacts and examples of, of, uh, non-statistically formed objects that you could discern from the background.
- CWChris Williamson
Given the fact
- 40:37 – 49:38
The Great Filter Hypothesis
- CWChris Williamson
that you think there's going to be life not only out there in the universe, but uh, you know, in planets that are next door to us within our own solar system, are you concerned that this has implications for the great filter hypothesis, Robin Hanson's thing, where he says that it's an answer to the Fermi paradox, there's something big that all civilizations need to get past? If we find life elsewhere, this means that we've got some huge filter to come up against.
- LCLee Cronin
No. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
I think th- (laughs) I think there's another big filter. You know what the big filter is? Expanding space and the speed of light.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that you can get captured in some corner of...
- LCLee Cronin
Well, it's hard to get from place to place. I mean, okay, what's more likely, that we're moving faster from, from, fast from, away from each other to approaching the speed of light, or that we've all... I think that, I think that human- human life on Earth is in danger in the end, but life on Earth is gonna do just fine.
- CWChris Williamson
Ooh.
- LCLee Cronin
I mean-
- CWChris Williamson
Why, why that? Why human life's in danger but?
- LCLee Cronin
Well, 'cause wait till Skynet comes. It's gonna have much more fun, it'll be resilient to the expanding sun, you know? There's, I mean I'm-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, you think we're gonna get AGI'd out of existence?
- LCLee Cronin
No, I think we'll, we, I mean, we won't. I mean, I'm being really flippant, but we're already become cyber physical right now. You know, we'll have my phone and connected with that, and then we'll have more and more kind of, um, interactions with technology. And so, um, and I'm very hopeful about the future of life on Earth, that it won't, we shou- I mean, obviously humans are gonna transition, but the race we're in right now, we're in a race to not be idiots, right? We're in a race to educate each other and give everyone a, a degree of equity with the po- with the population and to try and, we're trying to get out of this, um, this view that there are limited resources and those, and we then, we need to basically kind of have certain people constrained because of those resources. Once we reali- we, we understand we're no longer resource constrained 'cause of technology-... that humanity is going to have a field day. It's gonna be so fascinating watching it in the latter half of this century. We need to kind of sort out climate change. And sure, it's dangerous, and sure, crops could fail and water, but you know what would happen if crops fail and water, scarce? A load of people die. Tragedy? Sure, don't, I don't want to die, but not everyone would die, and then humanity will go again. So, you know, I don't think there's a great filter. I think that maybe there's a great filter on his imagination. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, dear me, Robin Hanson. I understand your idea around the fact that... And, and this is similar, I'm gonna guess, to the ratcheting thing that you said from earlier on. I understand your idea that technology opens up capabilities that you can't see. It's like the unknown unknowns of progression that you can move through. I also think, yes, a lot of the problems that we're coming up against that look like x-risks from the outside are probably not true existential risks, as in 100% of all humans are extinguished, or that we are irreversibly put into a situation that we can't get back from and b- whatever it is, irreversible civilizational collapse, two versions of x-risk. I don't think... I think you're right. There's some, maybe, you know, the bioengineered weapons, not tremendously fantastic, pretty fucking robust, probably gonna do a good bit of damage. But even nuclear war, you know, you set off all of the nukes on, on the planet, it doesn't kill everybody.
- LCLee Cronin
No.
- CWChris Williamson
It's, it's not nice, and it wouldn't be fun for quite a while, but it doesn't kill everybody. So yeah, you're right, w- humans are very, very resilient. And then, you're... So would you class yourself as a techno-optimist? I don't even know what that really means, but I hear people say it on the internet and I feel like I should use it.
- LCLee Cronin
Um, I think that, um... Well, I'm trying to get command of all matter, right? I'm trying to create origin of life.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
I'm trying to... I'm building what-
- CWChris Williamson
You sound like Thanos.
- LCLee Cronin
(laughs) No, because Thanos... No, no. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Command of all matter, all-
- LCLee Cronin
But, I mean, I'm trying to literally program matter digitally, so I wanna get digital control of matter to basically build stuff, and I just need information and energy for that. So there's enough energy coming from the sun for me to transform all the matter on Earth over time. In fact, biology's been doing it, arguably. So, I am an optimist, and I think that we should enable people to have a growth mindset. We've got political difficulties and so on. There's all sorts of interesting things, like humanity's coming. We're into... We understand what economics is, we understand what creativity is, we're understanding that we are pretty interesting in a causal chain, that we're worth preserving. And I think that, that this kind of... We also understand that our culture communicates some very deep and important truths about our past into the future that we don't know yet how to write down. You know, we are recording some of it, and we're capt- even if it's, like, in the manifestation of YouTube and TikTok. So yeah, I would say I'm a techno-optimist. Um, uh, not just because I'm living in some bubble somewhere, because I can see as a chemist what has chemists done, chemists done in the last 50 years. We've stopped the population from starving. We've ex- we've, we have decreased infant mortality. We have basically cleaned up the environment, yes, and we need to do it again, and oh dear, we have to remove the plastic, and oh dear, we have to remove the CO2, but we'll do it again, and we'll keep doing that. And I think the, the, the great filter perhaps, the really great filter is climate change when the sun expands and engulfs the Earth, u- Earth. But even then, we might have, like, pushed the Earth back a bit, or-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. That-
- LCLee Cronin
... evolved into, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
I, I was learning, uh, Anders Sandberg is working on a book at the moment where he's thinking about, what do you call it, uh, galactic landscaping, uh, where it... Precisely that. "I've go- I've got this lovely view, but there's this planet in the way, and if I could just get that... Oh, lovely," or whatever it might be. You know, like moving a, moving an Earth or a habitable planet away from a sun that's about to expand and destroy it, or whatever it might be. Yeah, I am... I do think moving forward that you're going to see far more opportunities open up. I would say that technology provides us with a lot of unknown unknowns. That means the potential in future is going to be really, really hard for us to grasp.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
What about the, the chance of any life in space? Is that completely beyond the pale that something might not need a planet to exist? Maybe it could have come from a planet and now either exists in space or it could be born in space? Is that, is that a thing?
- LCLee Cronin
I don't... I, I don't... (sighs) I don't know. I mean, my guess would be that it would probably find getting a date hard because space is quite big and gravity is quite useful to locate, to locate you.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- LCLee Cronin
And, and also, um, being in a solar system is unif- useful because you've got access to a reliable energy source, um, because you're typically gonna be orbiting a star. There obviously is a chance that perhaps a civilization gets propelled into space, maybe a plan- their planet gets ejected. Is there an example in the universe where a planet was happily doing its stuff and a, and a good civilization emerged, and suddenly the planet got ejected from the solar system and they had to quickly adapt, and, uh, they had enough resources to carry on for a while and it almost became like a lifeboat, and they're trying to work out how to get captured by another solar system? That could happen. That might be pretty grim, actually, the further... So just imagine you get thrown out of your house, if you get thrown out of your solar system for bad behavior, um...
- 49:38 – 53:43
Do Viruses Exist on Other Planets?
- CWChris Williamson
so, wha- talk to me about... You mentioned earlier on, uh, viruses, and you made an analogy between a human not being on earth versus a virus being basically outside of, what I'm guessing would be, a host.
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you considered whether, uh, is it likely that stuff like that would also be on other planets, other types of life?
- LCLee Cronin
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Would it be typical to see parasites and viruses and other things like that?
- LCLee Cronin
I think so. I mean, and I also think that perhaps the origin of life was a virus origin of life, and that things really get together in a dance for so long, and that would maximize the ability to explore the solutions. And then cells were a relatively late comer to the machinery, and the cells were just, like kept stuff together. It's like, "Right, I'll have you, I'll have you, I'll have you. Stay together please. Replicate together rather than chance happenings." And I think there is reason to believe that selection will occur at that kind of level on, uh, in the, uh, over the universe, and I would wonder if viruses are a universal characteristic of life. But, wouldn't it be fascinating if we go to Titan or indeed we find viruses coming from the outer solar system that have completely different technology or evolve technology that we can see is complicated, we can see is biological-ish, but we don't recognize the base pairs in the DNA and, uh, we don't recognize the protein? That would be, that would be mind-blowing.
- CWChris Williamson
I read a blog post a while ago talking about how a lot... Uh, it was a potential answer to the Fermi Paradox, talking about how a lot of life may evolve under water. There's a lot of water out there, liquid water. One of the problems you have with liquid water is that becoming an advanced civilization is pretty difficult because you can't smelt shit. You're not smelting anything, and you're not flying anywhere on a ice ship. Uh, is that something else that you've considered about the way that life that's exclusively under water could perhaps develop?
- LCLee Cronin
Probably. I mean, it might not have any version, but I think the Fermi Paradox is, is not a paradox. It's just because Fermi's imagination wasn't big enough, and I just think the problem... Yeah, I mean, you know, but... So everyone is saying, coming up with reasons why that stuff doesn't happen on the data point of one. I know... So I- I'm pretty sure there's life everywhere in the universe, but it's a, um, a continuum. So you start from almost non-life, sand, you go up, up, up, up, up, selection, selection, selection, selection, kind of autono- some autonomy at the cellular level, multicellularity, cr- animals, intelligence, rockets, and I think that we are basically characterizing it all wrong. We shouldn't be looking for an on-off switch. We'll be saying, "Oh, there's more memory there than not." So there's probably the process that gives life everywhere, but can we go and talk to someone? Well... And I think the thing, the reason Fermi didn't understand is that, um, is that the, the causal chain of events, the fact that we can talk to each other and everyone on planet Earth can kind of understand the cultures that we shared, uh, uh, a common ancestor. And that, you know, from mathematics to singing to whatever, you know, we might- We find an alien, we might not actually know it's an alien. We might not even s- understand we're seeing it. The Fermi Paradox might just be a, a, a, a ser- a basically a polarizing filter on your eyes, and you just can't see the evidence of life, which is why we have to build a new detection system to look for complexity first and then ask us- and then put it on a scale, and that's one of the things that I'm doing, 'cause then I can build a machine to make complexity and say, "How complex is it? And how much did I cheat?" Because I'm cheating in my lab, right? Everyone says, you know... I mean, I'm, my joke is like I don't want... I'm not a creationist. I- I don't, sorry, I don't believe... I'm not a creationist but I want to be one (laughs) . Which is basically, I don't believe in a creationist god, but if I make the Croninites, they are, they are gonna worship me. I'm gonna make sure of it.
- CWChris Williamson
Fantastic. I love it. Look, Lee Cronin, ladies
- 53:43 – 54:21
Where to Find Lee
- CWChris Williamson
and gentlemen. Lee, if people want to keep up to date with the work that you're doing and your lab and all that stuff, where should they go?
- LCLee Cronin
So, uh, my Twitter, @Lee, @LeeCronin, um, also my webpage, um, croninlab.com, and yeah, just se- just use that Google thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Lee, I appreciate you. Thanks, mate. (instrumental music plays) What's happening people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.
Episode duration: 54:21
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