"you can study chemistry you can study Physics you can study geology anywhere in the universe but this is the only place you can study biology this is the only place to be a biologist that's it yeah so..."

"the following is a conversation with Batu kachar an astrobiologist at University of Wisconsin studying the essential biological attributes of life this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please..."

"think phytogenetic trees could be one of the most uh romantic and beautiful Notions that can come out of biology it shows us a way to depict the connectedness of life and all living beings with one an..."

"Itself by just taking a few steps back and looking at the entire tree itself can give you an idea about the connectedness the relatedness of the organisms or whatever again you use to create your tree..."

"and so what are the different ways to do the Reconstruction so you can do that at the gene level or you could do it at the higher complex biology level right so what what in which way have you approac..."

"okay well let me ask you the ridiculous question then so how realistic is Jurassic Park can we study the genes of ancient organisms and can we bring the those ancient organisms back so the reason I as..."

"significant Innovation happened to the degree of leaving no record behind so what do we not have a record of which which part is it you the fun stuff to you is after the origin of Life which we'll tal..."

"biological innovations that took place in the past of this planet we work with a very limited set of um I don't want to even say data because they're fossil records so let's say imprints either that c..."

"you said fuck it is pretty foggy but weird and it gets foggier and foggier the more you the further you try to see into the past um biology is you you basically study with study the survivors broadly ..."

"definitely older um and and definitely very sophisticated very resilient than anything um else is someone working at the as a bacteriologist I feel like I need to defend them in this case because they..."

"engineer in the lab we work with E coli it's the most simple in in terms of models systems go goes organism that one can study well-established sort of a pet lab pet that we use it a lot for cloning a..."

"functions and there's just one mechanism that Evolution invented to convert it is so far we know there's there's only one nitrogen fixation pathway as opposed to say carbon you can find up to seven or..."

"most essential for life just to give context well we think of this as the cocktail you may hear what's in the cocktail it's the schnapps right carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen sulfur so there are five ..."

"absolutely and without that we wouldn't have we wouldn't have all the steps of evolution along the way oh absolutely it's very we tried to replicate in the most simplest way what Nature has come up wi..."

"inside ourselves yeah and that's the oldest uh computational device of life it's it's uh likely the key uh operation system that had to evolve for life to emerge it's uh more interesting or it's more ..."

"between the two and um yes it's it's informatic and we can um uh discuss this further too 100 let's please discuss this further which part are we discussing for each one of those are fascinating world..."

"manipulate RNA we can make even with single part chemistries we can create compounds what's a single part chemistry um that's I would say when you add all the recipes that you know that will lead you ..."

"that's a hundred percent requirement should be mandatory okay so chemistry uh so what else about this Machinery that we need to know chemically well uh chemically I think that that's it you have enzym..."

"process you cannot have chemistry process without chemistry what makes life interesting is that even if the chemistry isn't perfect even if there are accidents along the way if something binds to anot..."

"they coexist so for instance if we uh let's just talking about the chemistry part um we we know the certain um rate constant all these proteins that operate in this Machinery needs to Harbor in order ..."

"cool about it I think or there are many things that are very interesting about this thing but if you take if you remove it from the cell and put it in a Cell free environment it works just fine right ..."

"cells relies on but that what chemists showed from linear you can generate information that arrives to a processing center in the form of a linear polymer the informatic part of this system that I thi..."

"combinations that is really amazing if you think about there there are 500 different amino acids life can choose right it's narrowed it down to training we don't know why a lot of people think about t..."

"there's room for error there's probably room for probably in all five uh categories we're talking about there's probably room for air in the computation there's probably room from area there's yes exa..."

"mean I mean in my head just so you know because I'm a computer science AI person the the parallels between even like language models that encode language or now they're able to encode basically any ki..."

"humans spoken humans talk history exactly so we make trees to understand what is the original ancestor what did they use to say snow and if you have a lot of cultures who use the word snow you can ima..."

"which are highlighted in black squares so for people just listening we're looking at a standard RNA color table organizing a wheel there's an outer shell and there's an inner shell all used in the fou..."

"it's important to emphasize that this is not engineered by humans this is this evolved by itself like right humans didn't invent this just because we were just describing we're trying to find trying t..."

"Universe it also had trees but they all died off we call it the last because it is sort of the first one that we can track because we cannot we don't know what we cannot track right so it's one there'..."

"totally honest yes please this is how we did like caveats the tweets right so first of all it's not um 3.5 is still a very conservative estimate that's the first Direction uh I would say it's 3.8 is p..."

"it's like it like built up with stuff okay that and then so that's a first single biological and then from an evolutionary perspective the Luca like I start like my ancestors a single cell and then he..."

"the if if we manage to figure out how to drive life's evolution in it can if it can evolve uh a sophisticated sort of informatic um processing system like this you may ask yourself what might chemical..."

"is this is what you're generating every second the single Machinery is doing 20 a second 20s 21 for bacteria I believe eight four eukaryotes or nine 21 a second I mean that's super inefficient or supe..."

"I see metabolism as a way to keep translation going and translation keeps metabolism going but transition is arguably a bit more sophisticated process for the reasons that I just described so metaboli..."

"just replicate it I think when we truly understand the answer to that question we may have just made ourselves live right we I don't think we know quite how translation Machinery as a whole fits into ..."

"whether um if different planets in the universe had life would the capacity would increase or decrease it does life operate at its energy maximum and uh and they think that it does that it actually op..."

"constraint we have on earth right is the amount of energy yeah so that's one way to Define life well the input is energy and the output is what I don't know self-replicating wait how okay let's go the..."

"when we see it is one definition that the Supreme Court likes and that's a kind of an important thing to um to think about when we look about when we look at life on other planets so how do we try to ..."

"pretty I would I would say that and it's hard to quantify this or even measure it but it is a life is definitely the chemistry finding Solutions right so it is chemistry exploring itself but and and m..."

"that's what happened here chemistry can't build life if it's always living in the moment the physicists would be very upset with you okay so memory could be a fundamental I mean life is not just I mea..."

"properties of our ourselves as human beings so if we shouldn't break translation then we should try to break it yes to see how it will repair so which part you break I broke elongation so what's the r..."

"organism I wouldn't say so it's the it's a it's a it's organism it's not necessary because you the rest of this cell the rest of the uh genome is still modern and that goes back to the difference betw..."

"and we altered elongation by changing it with different versions of elongation that are either coming from species that still are around today you can imagine them as sitting on the tips of the Tree n..."

"level uh conserved identity across all modern versions when you travel back in time the identity decreases so elongation likely existed we have good reason to think that it existed at the dawn of life..."

"um I will say 150 days so every day not non-stop we repeated this experiment some kind of uh how much how many different kinds of environments are there we kept the environments into the same and beca..."

"punched the translation so we expected is it going to be is a translation are we going to see a change that will translation respond to this by fixing itself right away or will it be um another outsid..."

"um optimality that it was always sub-optimal it needed to say one more mutation perhaps to get there it accumulated four mutations that was we did a lot of experiments to understand this of course it ..."

"direction to yeah it's almost like you can imagine that you have this mess see closet and um you know happens to be an accurate representation of my life so if you can't you you take a look at it and ..."

"3.8 billionaire maybe older clearly subjected to a lot of chemical Evolution even prior to the last Universal common ancestor and then you jump and you see um emergence of cyanobacteria that's undenia..."

"me ask you this question having to do with my half a sleep tweet so saying that we all originate from one common ancestor um that's just one of them miraculous things about life on Earth of course you..."

"like some you know there's I talked to a bunch of people about another mystery which is consciousness right and there's people called pan psychists who believe Consciousness is one of the fundamental ..."

"there's no single question in biology I think that will give that the that would deliver that magnitude of that message and understanding but understanding how life here started at first place if it w..."

"of ultimate endpoint the most sophisticated amazing thing that nature could generate I think understanding and not even understanding but asking these questions of where did this even come from how di..."

"now you think like an origin of Lifestyle but it's funny that that one worked out let's see where else it goes but having just emptiness and unpredictability of uncovering a novel solution can also ha..."

"understand that if we don't the origin of life science I mean that's the and and the question here isn't exactly our ability to recapitulate everything that happened in the exact way that it happened ..."

"answer is yes so if you were to try to argue against my yes what would you say why not what's the worst that could happen if we seed another planet with life what are the things we should think about ..."

"is things that might have a conscious experience and then the the dark aspect of life is life is increasingly complex life maybe I'm anthropomorphizing but it seems to have the capacity to suffer huh ..."

"well of course other people would be concerned the more obvious concern is like well you just created a life form how do you know it's not going to be a super deadly virus that somehow is able to hurt..."

"if if we were to back up sponsor I like it let's go where to put it yeah if you try to back up remnants of our civilization right so we've got a potentially creates conditions on different planets so ..."

"with different chemistry because the idea behind us at this the way I would I thought about is that you understand that planet you understand the conditions you understand the chemistry of the planet ..."

"because I see suffering I see pain it's it's very interesting I think this is a question that really reveals about a lot about the person who's answering it well okay so the pushback on my pushback if..."

"just mammals and we understand mammals but like throughout like trillions of organisms that led up to those mammals and the organisms living everywhere like even bacteria there's death everywhere so m..."

"it's uh but I I understand the both sides of the equation right in in one level I can see that we may not have any other choice but to back up this chemistry somewhere else yeah so you would be saving..."

"humans there's a lot of suffering but there's also a lot of beauty and and we we could choose what we want to be or what we want to see right so the these attempts don't need not to come from not to c..."

"and like the uh you know there's all these cool technologies that Aid in the process of a human being being able to see the truth the deeper deeper levels like you know Wikipedia and just the internet..."

"I've talked to quite a few people in my life who've done who've gotten a lot of shit done have helped a lot of people and I don't know a single one of them who's not an optimist now there's a place fo..."

"somewhere in the physics also being a scientist that we know that we never know for sure and for the Outsiders perhaps that may be a very um strange way of living especially when your pursue is about ..."

"not no would not be good it would be great because they help to understand the parameters maybe formulate maybe quantify create models But ultimately you need to experiment unless it's quantum mechani..."

"the stuff that deepminded with Alpha fold and protein folding is really inspiring it's a it's inspiring in that you're able to do to solve a difficult biology yeah absolutely that's that's why there's..."

"what the the proposition I made I like to think of it as protospermia rather than panspermia because it seems it's even more it's a more proto-state than the acknowledging because in in Pan's permia y..."

"conditions doesn't matter how the initial conditions came to be they are what they are and let's go from there yeah and there's all kinds of fascinatingly different initial conditions in terms of chem..."

"I just to me okay here's how I think of Earth so I actually am able to hold all these possibilities in my head and all of them are inspiring to me I kind of think there's a possibility that Earth is j..."

"interesting yeah but it's I mean it's definitely um interesting to listen to but I I wouldn't uh place it you know I wouldn't know how to place it in the studies of origin of life I guess or early yes..."

"different than if if you think it's similar to looking for life in the universe is that what you're thinking no I'm saying there's a missing component that came from elsewhere but the whole entire org..."

"very interested in if early souls and first cells and what followed the origin of life but we cannot be given that it's a Continuum that's the between the origin and emergence of first cells it's hard..."

"geological yeah so when when we run this imaginary rewind and play experiments in our minds I want to know whether we are positioning all the same geologic events at the same chronological order as we..."

"despite that which is which is interesting you kind of think of the biological Innovations kind of happening on their own because we so we uh actually have a center of exploring this problem uh we wan..."

"looked at going back to nitrogen uh one thing that's fascinating about the way cells fix nitrogen uh the ones that can do is that they also do this through a lot of help of a lot of metals a lot of El..."

"of life flourishes so so it's not it's not a straightforward thing yes but your sense is that the different timing of the different conditions of the environment would change the way Evolution happens..."

"um yeah but are we replaying the tape in the same exact manner or are we meaning all the geological and environmental events are they happening at the same time because then you removed the randomness..."

"um we're I'm Alice and this is Wonderland this this is great this is great it's just that you know there's this is a place where robots flourish and this is that those plants are fake are you saying t..."

"lead to a few determined outcomes or the it's not that the outcome is determined per se but uh it's the pathways are restricted and the mutational trajectories that life can act upon uh are already ve..."

"a very different planet that did not have any Oxygen for 2 billion years we there's nothing that is familiar to us that we would even think about with when we think about life that is present in our p..."

"if we can find them and that's the key that most of these recorded um remnants are if we're lucky we find them they are not naturally selected they're they're found they need to be found for us to rea..."

"when you embark on an idea do you actually contemplate and accept uh failure like as a society I wouldn't say so but I eliminated a lot of the things uh out of my work line by simply not feeling like ..."

"and some are really good at it uh and they they get better edits under really good guidance maybe good mentorship and ultimately everyone finds their own style of problem solving and what sort of prob..."

"that the these places I've algorithm wants you to respond right away and interact with itself right so um I can see the appeal but through Innovation I think it doesn't even scream it doesn't it's not..."

"because comes with similar to bacteria right they they speak these languages they they have even we call this we call culturing the bacteria we call it culturing right when we grow bacteria that we is..."

"blender and you made it a smoothie you mean it can ruin the entire place can it though because I feel like yes I can definitely assess that for ginger first those that ruins every smoothie I don't lik..."

"and it's a very proud culture it's a beautiful culture it's a very flavorful culture what aspects of it is part of who you are that what what are the beautiful aspects that you carry with you and your..."

"just kidding um or a fake plant we love we can't help who we love uh what advice would you give to a young person today high school college um how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have ..."

"I had a chance to visit um Bosnia so I um was invited to give a talk in a very uh up north like very northernmost part of the country that was impacted by the war tremendously and it was a public talk..."

"starts A New Beginning be deceit for the Next Generation and it's moved me so much that they all came to hear about early life space something may be different for them that maybe they were always int..."

"living and I would want them to know that their voice matters and they need to use it especially uh those who think that their voice doesn't matter ultimately I think what it comes down to is to trust..."

"everything will be just fine it's mostly isn't but you learn away learn you know life does it all the time speaking of which what do you think is the meaning of all this what's the meaning of life why..."