Garry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #262

... how would you, as a higher intelligence, represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?

Do you think they saw what they say they saw?

It didn't just start showing up in 1947.

How hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans?

What do we believe in? We believe in technology. So you show yourself as a form of technology. Right? But the common thread is you're not alone and there's something else here with you and there's something that's, as you said, watching you.

You are a professor at Stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells. So let me ask first the big, ridiculous philosophical question. What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect of human biology at the level of the cell to you?

The micromachines and the nanomachines that proteins make and become, that to me is the most interesting. The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer within every cell that's constantly processing its environment and at the heart of it is DNA, which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process. People think of the DNA as a linear code. It's codes within codes within codes and it is the... Actually the epigenetic state that's doing this amazing processing. I mean if you ever wanted to believe in God, just look inside the cell.

So DNA is both information and computer?

Exactly.

How did that computer come about? A big... Continuing on the philosophical question, the... Is this both scientific and philosophical? How did life originate on Earth do you think? How did this at every level? So the very first step and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA, that is multicellular organism, and then maybe the fascinating, uh, complex computer that is the human mind.

Well, I think you have to take just one more step back to the complex computer that is the universe, right? All of the- the so-called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and, uh, appears, to me at least, to be a computational process and embedded in that is biology, right? So all the atoms of a protein, et cetera, sit in that computational matrix. From my point of view, it's computing something, it's computing towards something. It was created, in some ways, if you wanna believe in God, and I don't know that I do, but if you wanna believe in something, uh, the universe was created or at least enabled to allow for life to form.

Right.

And so the DNA, uh, if you ask where does DNA come from and you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins and, uh, the selfish gene hypotheses. The way I look at DNA though is it is not a moment in time, it assumes the context of the body and the environment in which it's going to live in. So if you- if you wanna ask a question of where and how does information get stored, DNA, although it's only three billion base pairs long, contains more information than I think the entire computational memory resources of our current technology. Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg all the way through to the day you die and it embodies all the different cell types and organs in your body. Uh, and so it's a computational, uh, reservoir of information and expectation that you will become. So actually I would sort of turn it around a different way and say, if you wanted to create the best memory storage system possible, you could reverse engineer what a human is and create a DNA memory system that is not just the linear version but is also everything that it could become.