Famous Inorganic Chemist on Why He Believes Aliens Exist, The Revolutionary Experiments That Could Create Life & How AI Companies Are Deceiving Us

Are aliens already among us? Are we even looking in the right way to find them? Renowned chemist, molecular visionary, and University of Glasgow Regis professor Lee Cronin joins Mayim and Jonathan to explore the science behind alien life, consciousness, and the very definition of biology itself. Known for his groundbreaking work in assembly theory and abiogenesis, Dr. Cronin dives deep into the possibility of non-carbon-based life, why the Fermi Paradox might be misleading, and how we could soon detect extraterrestrial civilizations through the mathematics of complexity. As one of the world’s leading voices in origin of life research, Dr. Cronin offers bold counterpoints to other guests on alien intelligence and reveals why he believes some exoplanets may already harbor advanced technology. He explains how chemical complexity could be the key to recognizing life in the universe, and why traditional astrobiology might be looking in the wrong place. The conversation also takes a turn toward the dark side of AI: how artificial intelligence may already be used by powerful institutions for dangerous, even covert purposes and why Cronin thinks we should rethink our fear of it. From the dream of building living machines to redefining what counts as life or consciousness, this episode is a mind-bending journey into the future of science, philosophy, and alien discovery. Learn more about The Cronin Group: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  With the Amex Gold Card, you can earn five times points at prepaid hotels booked online through Amex Travel. Earn rewards wherever life takes you with the Gold Card. Apply today at americanexpress.com/explore-gold. Terms apply.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  We haven't seen aliens and life, therefore, there isn't any there. The reason we haven't seen them is we don't know how to recognize them. We don't recognize how to communicate, and we don't really know what intelligence is.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  The Fermi paradox was built upon a false argument.

• 0:33Mayim Bialik?

  You're saying we may find a planet that has evidence that something lived there?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  On the average star, it's probably got several planets around it. What percentage of those stars can have life? It could be really quite high.

• 0:46Mayim Bialik?

  Life on this planet is carbon-based. What if life is not carbon-based elsewhere?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  The answer is almost certainly yes. It takes a massive leap of imagination. On Earth, we are a carbon life form with silicon technology. Could we flip it around and imagine a world where there's silicon life with carbon technology?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  We are in a big AI delusion right now. There are a number of levels where AI is being just misused and people just using it to steal money.

• 1:18Jonathan Cohen?

  What's the hard problem that you're focused on and how are you approaching it?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  We all want to know why we're here. We all want to have a connection to the cosmos. Chemifi's plan is to actually help us crack the origin of life by building the hardware to search chemical space. Solving the origin of life is not going to make life any less wonderful. It's going to make it more wonderful.

• 1:43Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 1:44Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:45Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Wow. Get ready, people.

• 1:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Love.

• 1:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Aliens, artificial intelligence, consciousness, the future of spreading humanity across the galaxy. Have we found aliens? We may be looking for the wrong thing.

• 2:07Mayim Bialik?

  Who is the only person who can talk about all these things? Believe it or not, it's an inorganic chemist. We've talked a lot here about life on other planets. Are they here? Are they coming? Have they already existed? Do we know how to find them? Lee Cronin is the Regis Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and he's the founder and CEO of Chemify. And Dr. Cronin is going to talk to us about the reason that selection of complex behavior and complex matter can lead us to a better understanding of how to look for life in the universe.

• 2:51Mayim Bialik?

  His perspective is, it's not even that we're looking wrong. We don't even exactly understand yet how to frame the examination of life on other planets. But he is going to break down for us all the ways to think about it, to reframe it, and also to understand what that means for our lives now.

• 3:09Jonathan Cohen?

  He's also going to help us understand artificial intelligence. News alert, he believes they are lying about artificial intelligence, the future of artificial intelligence, what it can do well and what it can't. And some of the sort of more shocking statements and ideas that Lee has is that some of this news cycle is deliberately being generated to pump up stock values and is actually, there's not evidence to support it.

• 3:40Mayim Bialik?

  And in case you're wondering why a chemist can do all these things, he's going to explain to us what the process is of being an inorganic chemist. In addition, he works in computational systems. So he is someone who lives and works in code, in probability, and in understanding how we build complicated things from simple things. So prepare to have your mind blown by Professor Lee Cronin. Lee Cronin, welcome to the Breakdown.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  It's great to be here.

• 4:10Mayim Bialik?

  You're our first chemist that we've had on.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Really? Wow.

• 4:13Mayim Bialik?

  Yep. Yep, had a lot of physicists, lot of, uh, lot of internists, but never a chemist.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Someone told me yesterday that chemistry is just physics with attitude.

• 4:28Mayim Bialik?

  Well, the real reason I brought you here is to tell you that I could not get an A in organic chemistry, and it's why I didn't go to medical school.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I'm sorry. Wow.

• 4:37Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, it's really too bad. I actually wonder if, you know, now that I understand the things that I understand about science, if I were to go back, maybe I could finally master organic chemistry and give it another go.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Organic chemistry is a funny one. I'm on a single crusade against it because I, I'm an inorganic chemist, right, which means that I'm allowed to not know anything.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  But organic chemists pride themselves on the way they train one another, and it's actually pretty brutal.

• 5:10Mayim Bialik?

  Can you explain for people who don't kind of know, you know, for many people when they hear chemist, they think like, that's the person at the pharmacy. Can you talk to us about what it means to be, in your case, a regus and, you know, an expert on inorganic chemistry?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so chemistry obviously is a central science in between physics and biology and a bunch of other things. And chemistry is just about the electrons. Where are the electrons? And matter. So doing material science, making molecules, designing drugs, making dyes, literally, but like I said, chemistry really is physics with attitude, right? And it's because when you start to consider complicated systems, lots of electrons, the chemist's job is to find out where the electrons are, to control reactivity, to get the, the, the design right. So the probably the reason why you found organic chemistry

• 6:09Speaker 01

  inspiring, annoying, whatever the word, is you have to learn these rules, right? Where do the, where, where, how do I, what is a recipe I use to make this molecule? And where are the, where are the bonds? And what is react, what is going to react, what is not going to react? So chemistry is a bit like taking the periodic table, which is the toolbox of which chemists have of all the elements, and knowing about their chemistry, reactivity.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I became an organic chemist because I love color changes and also setting fire to things. So, and so I guess that's kind of the gamut of chemistry, understanding how to build molecules and materials.

• 6:47Mayim Bialik?

  So, in the world that we live in, we're interacting all the time with things, and those things are made of very, very small things. You take it from there and explain what you do again.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so there are these things called atoms, and these atoms have a nucleus, right? And they've got protons and neutrons. The neutrons have no charge and the protons have a positive charge. Now, to balance that charge, you have electrons on top. And the control of those electrons, in particular what we call the bonding electrons, is what the chemist does. But the chemist doesn't really look and poke at the electrons, not all the time. They're really about, you know, making recipes to mix together the right materials so a reaction will occur. But actually, you've got these atoms, the atoms, they increase in charge in protons as you go from hydrogen to helium. You keep going through the periodic table, you get heavier and heavier.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  The more protons, the more electrons. The more electrons, the more chemical diversity. So if you take carbon, which is a really important element, and hydrogen, which is also important, hydrogen is, can only bond with other, one other atom of itself typically called hydrogen, so you have H2. Carbon can do a lot more, it can make four bonds with different atoms very easily, and it can also have other configurations, less than four bonds, which means you can make chains and you can make kind of, I suppose, like, imagine a kind of origami, if you like, of material that can be wrapped together. And that's, that's what we spend our job, our days doing.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Adding these elements together, heating them up, cooling them down, making sure we can purify them to make sure they're clean and full of, that we know what we've made. And we then spend a lot of time using very special techniques to work out what we have, a kind of type of microscope, actually. And that's where you go. So, periodic table, reactivity, microscope. That's what the chemist does.

• 8:54Mayim Bialik?

  So, given this framework...

• 8:58Mayim Bialik?

  You operate on the level of understanding essentially not just what things are made of, but how they interact. And as we've talked about here, we've had Adam Frank on, you know, we've had Robin Hanson on. As we've talked about, one of the things that we know is that carbon is this beautiful kind of scaffold from which you can build very reliable structures. And carbon can, you know, create all of the life forms that we have access to and all of the things that we have access to. So we, we live in kind of a, a carbon-based world, right? Our percyneum is carbon-based.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:40Mayim Bialik?

  And when, when we talk about, I mean, you operate on the smallest level essentially that one can operate on, pretty much. But we're interested also in how some of the smallest concepts can apply to some of the biggest questions. So, life on this planet is by and law, it's carbon-based, right? Like, everything's carbon-based.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:08Mayim Bialik?

  And when people talk about, could there be life on other planets?

• 10:15Mayim Bialik?

  Most of us come at this from a carbon-based perspective, right? Much as if you're a materialist, you're going to approach everything from a materialist perspective. But you have this sort of notion, and part of your work is sort of explaining these concepts. What if life is not carbon-based elsewhere? How do we get there?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  So, that's a really interesting question. Right now, life on Earth, it seems, and it is very special because we're unique, we don't know of life anywhere else. So what's happening is we're looking at us and going, well, you know, what is special about it? Is it the carbon? Because carbon's really important. It's the water. Water is really, you know, we've got liquid water all over Earth, right? It's not frozen, it's not at steam, it's a nice liquid and we can do stuff in the liquid. And as an inorganic chemist, I know that elements can do lots of things, right? I could do stuff with iron, with phosphorus, with silicon. It's interesting, on Earth, we are carbon life form with silicon technology.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And that's that's kind of cool. Could we even could we flip it round and imagine a world where there's silicon life with carbon technology? Um, I think the answer is almost certainly yes. But it's it takes a massive leap of imagination. Now, why carbon on Earth? I can give you three very simple answers for that. First of all, the size of the Earth and the gravitational um, um, strength, right? Its position relative to the sun, so the amount of temp heat we're getting. Okay, and the fact we've got a nice atmosphere, one atmosphere. So one atmosphere gives us enough pressure to condense water at room, at a kind of good sea level, twenty five degrees Celsius. I have to convert to Fahrenheit. I'm sorry, I'm getting so bad at that, but you know.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Um, and and so the conditions on Earth, gravity, temperature, uh, and kind of location to the sun. And also the fact we're a rocky planet gives us all this material to play with. And it seems that the life that we have on Earth today is a reflection of the chemistry that was happening at the origin of life. Is like carb, there might have been a carbon battle with silicon and the carbon started evolving and then acquired all the resource and the the sunlight, if you like, and just was able to make a biosphere. And that's why carbon got chosen.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Um, that's not the, that's not the average view, though. Lots of people think carbon is super special. It is special, but it's not special. So the second one is, so is the temperature and the liquid. So they're the other two things. What's special about carbon in particular on Earth is it's, it can form brittle materials, like you can imagine diamond. And it can form plasticky materials, like even plastics and and protein and things like that, which is flexible. You can even make single layers of carbon, which conduct electricity really well. That's called graphene. Supposed to be a wonder material that we could use to replace all the, you know, all our

• 13:29Speaker 01

  the copper in our electronic circuits one day, maybe. So carbon really is very versatile and is everywhere in the universe.

• 13:36Mayim Bialik?

  So we do know certain things that we can look for when we look for life on other planets, right? And Adam Frank talks about this and he's literally funded by NASA to do this, right? He looks for, um, signatures. He looks for biosignatures. He looks for kind of eco-signatures. You know, if we create the mess in the ozone that we create.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  ignites and there's enough stuff to stop it blowing up. So basically it's like starting an engine and turning it over and it's like, cause lots of stars must go and like, oops, sorry, we'll go on. But when you get it at the sweet spot, you've got nuclear fusion happening. So the origin of the sun is to do with a gravity. Gravity is the process by which stars form. You need hydrogen and that's it in a bit of time. Now let's take life. If we can define life properly, you can say, what are the prerequisites for life? Um, well, you need

• 14:37Speaker 01

  stuff. And what I've come up with is a theory that suggests that there is a force in the universe we don't really yet understand. We're beginning to understand now that is responsible for producing life in the same way the force of gravity produces suns. What is that force? It's selection.

• 15:00Mayim Bialik?

  I thought you were gonna say it's God. I was like, this is gonna go a totally different direction than I thought.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  No, no, there is no God.

• 15:07Mayim Bialik?

  Well, you may, you may call it gravity or you may call it whatever you call it. I just think it's divine because it's unbelievable that we're talking about this.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 15:15Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, the, the hair on your head is divine. Like, that's just, it's like, the things that happen in the universe are amazing.

• 15:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, let's go into selection. Let's go into selection because where I think this may lead us is what are the factors that produce life? Because if we're looking currently for life in a way that may not be how life is in the rest of the solar system, what might it be? So let's talk first about selection.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So selection, so I'm annoying all the evolutionary biologists in the world right now. They're all grumpy. And, and the reason is that this new idea that we've got experimental evidence for, if I called it a new word, right? If I made up a new word, let's call it, I don't know. Ba ba ba ba ba, whatever, like a fancy new word. Everyone said, oh, Lee, you're just making up new words. Right?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  But what I realize is that selection, although evolutionary biologists have commandeered that word to mean a special thing, there is selection that can occur before biology. Right? And all this coming back is like, because cells didn't just spring in like magic. I don't believe in magic. Magic is not a good answer for the origin of life. Anyway, it may be divine, that's fine, as you said about starts. But like magic isn't good enough. So selection is merely when the process where matter interacts and the matter makes a transition. And we're going to use these words very carefully and you can reel me back in and play it back out. So we're really precise.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Because, you know, it should be easy to understand, but it is, it is, requires just a bit of repetition. So you have stuff, let's call it sand. Sand blows together, clumps together. When the sand starts to turn into a well-defined feature, that it becomes an object. That object can do one of two things. It can persist in the environment, stay, stay there, hey, new object. Or it can get ground back into sand and blown away and it will dissipate, die or not persist. So in a dynamic environment, that's a very important initial phrase, in a dynamic environment,

• 17:37Speaker 01

  selection, selection occurs when things turn into objects and those objects, despite being under attack by the environment, can persist over time and get copied and renewed and don't turn back to dust.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And that process of selection is what where evolution begins.

• 18:01Mayim Bialik?

  I really love this explanation and I'd like you to frame this in the paradigm that those of us who had to, you know, learn biology in a standard university or a graduate program, where there's a primor and my and the Alex breakdown is supported by Quince. You know, those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again. That sweater that somehow works with everything, the jeans you know, will always fit just right. The bag you carry everywhere. Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted and made to be worn again and again.

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• 19:46Speaker 00

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• 20:01Mayim Bialik?

  We learned this in, you know, you learned this in third grade, fourth grade, right? There's a primordial stew. There's some, you know, I mean, as I pictured it as a child, before I even knew I'd become a scientist one day, there was like a lake, which again, it's kind of like trying to imagine what nothingness is. But I pictured this lake, and there was stuff in the lake, not realizing that the lake could only exist once the stuff had created things that allow a lake. But again, there's like some stew, and there's stuff in there, and they told us that lightning comes down, and it electrifies the water. And then, single-celled organisms evolve. And then, one single-celled organism eats another, and then you have a multicellular organism,

• 20:45Mayim Bialik?

  and then we get humans, right? That's sort of the paradigm. Where does this sand paradigm fit into the paradigm that we've been taught? Is how, literally, we got here to have a conversation with satellites in the sky, and like, love in my heart for my children, and all the things that happen in the universe.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, the short answer is, no one knows, because no one has been there, right? I think that's the honest answer. In the same way that probably no one has been up close and seen a star starting, but we have seen stars that start in the sky, right? And yeah, see, oh, there was a cloud there, and now there's a star, that's cool. Oh, there was a star, now there's a black hole. Oops, you know. We haven't seen, we can see cells divide, so we can see biology continuing. We have not seen sufficient complexification to understand how a prebiotic environment becomes biotic. And that's a question to time scale.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And also, it's a lack of imagination of the chemists and the prebiotic dogmatists that are saying, you know, this is how it happened. And actually, it is, caused quite some stagnation in the field.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  It could have been in a warm little pond, it could have been in the ocean, it could have been in the atmosphere. But I think we're narrowing it down and say, look, you do need an interface, you do need energy, you do need some carbon. And you need selection to occur. And, and what I think is the paradigm that people are really tripping over, like I'm, you know, what I'm saying is. Is it heretical? I don't think it's heretical, but it's annoying, right? It's like people don't wanna hear it.

• 22:41Mayim Bialik?

  Why? Why, why do you think people call you a heretic?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Well, number one, they think I'm just over blowing my, blowing my own trumpet, saying, you know, the assembly theory that I might tell you about selection is the answer to everything. And I'm just overly, just, just making stuff up, right? Um, which I'm like, no. Uh, making stuff up is making stuff up, right? You know, it, it, what I'm trying to say is, hey. The, I love to do real time science. I think my job as a scientist is not only to do really good science. But actually to show people what happens when new science happens. Because what there is such an attack on science right now, where people like. They will remain nameless, saying I'm under attack and I'm not taking seriously because my theory of everything, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, your fear of everything is just BS.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Right? It's just that you get because you just made it up. Because there's this process we go for of reasoning. And all I did said, look, I, science is about problems and on problem, how did life start? Do we know what life is? And that's kind of their two really interesting problems. Like, well, if we don't know what life is, how do we even know where it starts and what conditions? So I just basically kept replacing the problems with simpler problems. And that's where I got back to this kind of, well, their selection occurs in biology and means one thing. But there is an inorganic selection that can occur before biology, because otherwise, how do you get to the cell? And the complexity of the cell, you know, you have to rely on a creator.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And I'm, I, my big joke is I'm not a creationist. But I want to be one. Well, if I make life in the lab.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I did it. I'm the creator. I'm God. Get to become God. Now, of course, that's kind of tongue in cheek. Because I hopefully will set up conditions that are plausible that will occur on other rocky planets. So you can go, oh, there's some rocks, there's some water, there's some carbon. There's this interesting process of complexification that occurs through selection. And look, oh, this is how solution, evolution gets going in this environment. That looks interesting. Probably that's what happened on Earth.

• 24:57Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I just, I mean, the, the other conclusion is you're not just the God of this planet. You're the God of all planets.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. Go to the wagon and say, come on.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  No, I mean, joking aside, um, I, you know, it is a. I do think that we are not being brave enough in nowadays and coming up with new theories. You've got crackpot saying, you're not listening to my theory. And you've got conventional science going, we're too scared to go out on a limb. And I'm like, I'm not, I mean, why be scared? Just do it. What, what's the worst gonna happen? People tell you wrong.

• 25:34Mayim Bialik?

  So my primordial stew story gets to hold, obviously with some modifications. I mean, from the time that I was in, I'm about your age, from the time I was in third grade to the time I was an undergrad. Right? Like a lot had already transpired. By the time I got to graduate school, it had changed already. And it's changed, you know, already in the 20 years since I finished. So I want you to help us get from this primordial stew conversation to this inorganic potential for evolution, right? Which you're calling selection, really in the most, um, you know, secular form of that word.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 26:14Mayim Bialik?

  How, how does that open us up to a conversation about maybe we're looking wrong? Or maybe the questions that we're asking about life on other planets are not even the right questions. How do we get there?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's really good. So I think the way we get there is to say, look, you you you make certain assumptions about your primordial soup primordial stew, right? That is a warm pond. There may be some water, some energy, some stuff in there and things just happen. And you need the ingredients because we're working backwards from what we see in our current life. But actually, that doesn't seem to be very plausible. Because we are so complicated, there's so many weird things happen. I mean, you know, what is it that decided that I was going to have an asymmetric, I don't know, internal organs and my liver is on one side and on the other end, yeah, I've got two eyes and all this stuff, right?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  And and of course, a lot of that was controlled by the force of gravity and the amount of material available and the need for competition. And so selection seems to be this thing that, you know, results in a kind of chemical competition, if you like, and resources. And there's low technology. You can see the origin of life. There was no technology. There was no life. So selection had to produce a kind of primitive technology for competition. You know, capitalism is selection, right? It is. And like all capital, you know, so that's kind of, so that's one side to get there. And the other one is like, because we've been working backwards and saying, look, I need carbon, I need water, I need these things.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  We look up and say, we need oxygen, we need water, we need this, we need water, we need a Goldilocks, so we need carbon, we need this type of atmosphere. And what it does, it allows people to make a load of pronouncements about the planet that that that we just don't know. I think when I look up in the sky and I go back to that, you know, there's, I think there's five planets, like five types of planet that can be the the dead planet, never ever going to be alive, poor sad planet, right? Maybe it's something like Mercury. There is a planet that's prebiotic, it's getting it on, right? There's, there's a planet with life on it that is kind of boring, you know, the first billion years of life on Earth. There's a planet with life and tech and complex life and technology.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  And there's a planet planet where all life is dead and and there might be, well, there's so many other planets, maybe two more now, but but you're basically post life and there's just technology. Right? They're the kind of planets I could imagine, right? Maybe I could order six for something like that, you know, dead and just technological. Or, oh yeah, and the dead one could have never had life on it, but there's another dead one there where there were, there's living art. There are artifacts on it that were alive on technology.

• 29:08Mayim Bialik?

  Hold on, I have to stop you. I have to stop you because this is just something that you just talk about at your paper bag lunches at the university. You just very casually informed us that there is a planet that you can imagine that had life and sophisticated technology. And we might discover this planet and there's no, I don't want to say nobody there because I don't know if they were buddies. I don't know what it was, but you're saying we may find a planet that has evidence that something lived there and there's technology there.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:44Mayim Bialik?

  Is it made of carbon?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I don't know. I haven't been yet.

• 29:51Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, but okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you a super basic question. Why do you believe that there are planets with technology? Like, that's even like, for many of us, that's even a leap.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, I agree, it's a massive leap. But here's the thing. If selection is as common as gravity.

• 30:18Mayim Bialik?

  Yep.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Gravity is really good at making starts. So I think selection, so I'm just extrapolating wildly. And that, let's suppose that selection is a force in the universe, force of existence, right? And it happens everywhere. The way you look for this, you say, oh, what I need to do is I need to look for, what is the zone in which I need to look for? I obviously, I can narrow, I can help us narrow it down, where the planets need to be, how much energy needs to be nearby and stuff like that. So I think we can push into that. But sure, there will be planets in the universe that are dead and just old technologies on them. Maybe, you know, we're lucky if some, if one, if a star nearby goes supernova, it could get rid of all biology on the planet.

• 31:04Mayim Bialik?

  Well, okay, so this, I mean, it's kind of crazy that we're talking about this, but you're the most sophisticated person I've ever gotten to ask this question. What if, when we talk about life on other planets, we don't even have the equipment right now with which to see that life? Now, a lot of, and a lot of people say, "I'm experiencing things, I'm witnessing things, I believe that I'm being visited by entities," or "I'm seeing flying saucers." Like, are those the same things to you? Or, you know, when people are like, "Oh, well, nothing could travel that fast, you know? We know that things have to travel at the speed of light," right?

• 31:46Mayim Bialik?

  What if that entire framework has to be sort of, I don't want to say thrown in the garbage, but turned upside down to say, "The method of observation is what actually needs to evolve for us to be able to detect life on other planets."

• 32:01Speaker 01

  That statement is correct. The method of observation has to evolve to detect life on other planets. I'm not sure I'd go so far to say we're being visited right now, and there's good reasons...

• 32:11Mayim Bialik?

  I don't think, I have a lot of reasons why we're not. Not just like, "Oh, I'm a materialist and I don't believe it." I've got a lot of other reasons. Why aren't we being visited now? Why isn't that a probable, you know, explanation of, "There's life in other planets and we know it because they're probing people's anuses?"

• 32:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Always to the anuses with you.

• 32:32Mayim Bialik?

  Because it's a fantastic story!

• 32:34Speaker 01

  So I think the biggest problem is space is just so damn big. That's the problem. I think, so there is a, the answer to the Fermi paradox is a bit like, when your little seed, I think we're thinking about the universe entirely wrong, but this is probably an entirely new podcast one day about it, because I think like, I think that our universe we have created in our own common total space on Earth is bigger than the rest of the universe, actually, in some regard. And so we're kind of thinking about space and time in the wrong way. The sad part of me makes me think that because we're so far away and our what our causal cone would call it, right? Sarah calls it, my collaborator Sarah Walker calls it a causal cone.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I might call it an assembly space. That is, when you plant that seed of complexity and it all that so that process of selection that produces objects that become more complex. They all share a common lineage, the kind of history, so they can basically build technology. As you go up and up and up that commentary, that's a bit weird, then you find two, and then you find 10, and then you find 100, you're like, holy cow, someone, life is here. Similarly, if you went and found a complex molecule, right? Or lots of identical cells. So really, what you can do is you can get away from the does it walk? Does it talk? Does it have two eyes? Does it have gray hair?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Does it have amino acids? Does it have whatever feature you say? Does it have, number one, complexity? We have to define that rigorously. I had to make a new definition. And are there lots of copies?

• 34:13Mayim Bialik?

  So that means that I'm looking at something, though, that clearly evolved after us. Obviously, because in theory, if we think about complexity the way I believe you do, we would go from less complex to more complex. Us being, quote, more complex than what I would be looking at. So the, the, the important question I have for you is what could that look like for things that have existed millions of years before us? Because why do I think I'm first, unless I'm coming from, you know, a theological, right, perspective of like, we were placed here and we're special, you know, but let's put that aside because it's not necessary, I don't think, for our conversation.

• 34:57Mayim Bialik?

  But what happened, you know, Robin Hanson, who we had on, you know, who loves to talk about these things. He's like, oh, it's most likely that there are alien civilizations millions of years old that have already far surpassed our technological prowess and have figured out ways to escape our observation and likely are Are domesticating us. They're just watching and waiting for what we blow up next. So they can either dominate, right? Because they're far more sophisticated than we are. Or they're gaining some sort of surveillance information. I, you know, I mean, what I look at at my computer must be fascinating to aliens. But can you talk a little bit about the, the lack of presumption necessary for this theory that we are the first?

• 35:41Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, Robin explains that they're likely trying to avoid us escaping Earth and going off into the rest of the solar system because there's an inherent risk in that. But we can pause that topic and, and focus on what Mayim just said.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, Robin, Robin needs to get out more.

• 36:03Mayim Bialik?

  If an inorganic chemist is telling you to get out more, you need to get out more.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, actually, I should be cheeky, Robin. I, I love his ideas. I think he's great. But no, I don't agree with it. But, um, one quick correction. I don't think assembly theory says that life just becomes infinitely complicated.

• 36:21Mayim Bialik?

  Got it.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Right? I think that's important.

• 36:23Mayim Bialik?

  It's a, it's a, it's a process.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  There is a minute, it's like, exactly, like, a sun is not infinitely hot. You just need enough to break down and cause fusion.

• 36:33Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, got it.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So there needs to be enough sophistication so you can bring raw material in and energy and have Darwinian evolution. And actually, you do have complexity, lots of scales. I mean, like, we have memes now, like, right? Human evolution, our people on Twitter and Truth Social throwing, basically slagging each other off, right?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's, but look, you think about it. The origin of life has allowed us to produce a meme machine where we basically told each other we're, we're lying on a, on a, on, you know, on a global scale. And actually, that's what's happening. That's in our technology, enabled by that technology. It's absolutely fascinating. So I think there is. There is a lot of complexity in that you go from, let me all go the way back because you haven't just got the origin of life problems, you've got the origin of life problem. Then you start to get multicellularity and then you start to get kind of, you know, plants and animals and fungi and whatnot, right? And then you get this transition to animals that can build senses and they can see the environment.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  And first of all, they have to just react quickly. So there's no real, what I call reasoning, they just have to react instinctually. So instinct is something that's produced on a kind of, on a long time scale where genetics evolved. But then actually, then you have to get to instantaneous decision making. And then language and intelligence and all this stuff. There's so many layers in your technology and the artifacts that it is, there's a lot we can dig into.

• 38:05Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, you corrected me about complexity, but it was on the, and I want to return to this in a second because I want to ask you about the next evolution of our kind of conscious experience. But I want you to take me to why, why would we assume that we're the fountainhead of the evolutionary process at all? And what, what does it look like or what does it feel like to imagine that we are not the first? We could be millions and millions of years beyond other evolution?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, no, I think that's entirely possible. I could say that, you know, and I could say that intelligence may have taken a long time to emerge on Earth, simply because we had to master oxygen fixation, right? And if the planet had been a different density and different amount of oxygen and so on, we might not have needed to keep randomly playing around with photosynthesis and then working out how we can increase our energy density. And, and our IQ, our, our time averaged IQ as a planetary species may have been a lot higher. I mean, it took us billions of years to get here. That was one dumb planet for a really long time.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  So, you know, so I think you're entirely right. There's no reason why we should assume we are the fountainhead, except for the following, that you think about you've got origin of the origin of the universe. Then you've got first suns, first stars, well, first, then you've got your first galaxies. Stars explode. Stars explode and produce material. Material forms planets. Planets then allows you to then start origin of life. So you have got a fundamental time limit, like how long does it take for the first star to form? How long does it then take for that star to explode? And then to form another planet around another star? So you have, there is a few billion years, right? And where are we? Thirty point seven billion years.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  So how much quicker could life had emerged on in our universe is a very interesting question. Could have happened faster. And from that point of view, I mean, Robert is right, I would say.

• 40:17Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, some people would say intelligence still hasn't fully evolved on this planet. Maybe we need more oxygen.

• 40:29Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to hit pause here. There's so much more to talk about with Dr. Cronin. So we're going to pause here. We're going to release part two, which will include Assembly Theory, which is what his laboratory focuses on, as well as the other incredible research and amazing things that he is working on in his lab. We're also going to talk about consciousness and what does he think about love and more spiritual components of the intuitive process, the creative process? Please stay tuned for episode two with Dr. Lee Cronin.

• 40:58Jonathan Cohen?

  If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you follow anywhere you get podcasts to make sure that you are notified of episode two and come join the Breaker community, the growing Breaker community on Substack. It is our platform where we release never before seen footage, have deep conversations with Mike and Jonathan and special guests that you can't see anywhere else.

• 41:21Mayim Bialik?

  We hope to see you over on Substack and we can't wait for you to hear part two of our interview with Dr. Lee Cronin.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  It's my and Pialix breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's gonna break down, it's a breakdown. She's gonna break it down.