Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #269

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

If we go back to the origin of earth and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago, 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.

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-