Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens About this episode Betül Kaçar is an astrobiologist at University of Wisconsin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Betül’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/betulland
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Kacar Lab: https://kacarlab.org/
Betül’s TED Talk: https://go.ted.com/betulkacar
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(08:20) – History of life on Earth
(16:25) – Origin of life
(39:11) – Genetic language of life
(52:08) – Life and energy
(1:02:50) – Ancient DNA
(1:21:48) – Evolution
(1:33:19) – Alien life
(2:01:19) – Panspermia
(2:07:41) – Restarting life on Earth
(2:20:23) – Where ideas come from
(2:27:54) – Science and language
(2:36:31) – Love
(2:37:55) – Advice to young people
(2:42:29) – Meaning of life
Transcript 25,711 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Batu Kachar, an astrobiologist at University of Wisconsin, studying the essential biological attributes of life. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Macadamias for a satiating and delicious snack, Mizunamane for style, Eight Sleep for naps, ExpressVPN for privacy and security, GiveDirectly for philanthropy, and Blinkist for nonfiction. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
0:44 Lex Fridman? This show is brought to you by House of Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high-quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door, which they did just today. Another shipment. I got in my hand, an unopened box dipped macadamias chocolate flavor. This is the one I went through first last time, and it was delicious. It is an incredible source of happiness for me. I knew for a long time that macadamia nuts were really healthy. Because I remember when I was first exploring, okay, so on keto, what is the way to get fats into the diet? Because that's to be a high-fat diet. And I was looking at nuts, and I was thinking of it, okay, which nuts are the healthiest? And I remember macadamias always coming up to the top of the list. I'm going to try not to eat all of them
1:29 Lex Fridman? so that I have some for guests when they come over. Because it's like a perfect guest snack. It's healthy, it's delicious, it's just pure perfection. They also sent me some macadamia bars, which were also delicious last time. I'd probably prefer the whole nuts. I'm nuts for nuts. Anyway, go to houseofmacadamias.com/lex to get 20% off your first order.
1:58 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by Miz and Main, the maker of comfortable stylish dress shirts and other menswear. I wear their black dress shirt and I love it. I have a ton of them. Sometimes when I do these ad reads,
2:12 Lex Fridman? I struggle to try to convey exactly why I like this particular piece of clothing, which is where I wish there was like a brain-computer interface way to directly communicate the actual experience of wearing the clothing. And if you get a large number of people with that data, you get a sense of, okay, well, 96% of people feel good in this. That's a good chance that I will also feel good in it. That's fascinating. Of course, you could get that through self-report surveys, but it would be nice to get direct data because you can't lie. But the feelings don't lie. But then again, there could be other kinds of variables, like what else is going on in your life? You might be just in a bad mood about something else
2:56 Lex Fridman? or watch a really sad movie while wearing the shirt. So I don't know. It's an imperfect system that we're gonna have to work out. Right now, you'll get $35 off any regular-priced order when you go to MizAndMaine.com and use promo code Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress. They've been a sponsor forever. And they've been my bed, mattress, cooling system when I sleep forever. And it's a source of a lot of happiness. I recently tweeted about the number of hours there are in a regular lifetime. You know, if you live 70 to 80 years old,
3:38 Lex Fridman? there's about 600,000 to 700,000 hours in a life. And I think a large percent of those hours is spent sleeping. Of course, you could think of sleeping as an important process for health, to regenerate your energy and all that kind of stuff. But it is also, in itself, a source of happiness. And I think you wanna use the best bed for the job. And there's just not a better feeling of a cool surface with a warm blanket. And a day full of battles won, and you return to rest and reminisce about the battles. So you can, again, the next day, return to the battles that are in store
4:23 Lex Fridman? for you. Check it out and get special savings when you go to asleep.com/lex.
4:31 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many years. They've had the big sexy button that just works when you press it. And I use it, you know, it's the first layer of protection of your data, of your privacy on the internet. ISPs and basically a lot of different services and tools collect your data. And a good VPN is, should be your first layer of protection in those situations, in most situations. You know, you can also change your location in the world. Now, this is useful for different services like Netflix and so on. But mostly, I just like it from a software engineering, design perspective. I love tools that just work. They do one thing and they do it really
5:14 Lex Fridman? well. And they do it across different platforms. They never break down. Everything just works. Everything's intuitive from the UI perspective. And from the backend perspective, everything's just, it works smooth. Android, Linux, everything. I love it. Go to expressvpn.com/lexpod for an extra three months free.
5:35 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that lets you send cash directly to people in need. It's perhaps a counterintuitive notion, but the giving of money to alleviate some of the suffering in the world, or to improve the quality of life for a bunch of people in the world, is not an easy problem. I mean, there's so many challenges. And there's just a lot of studies behind the principles that GiveDirectly operates under, which is, if you actually give money to the people most in need, they're going to themselves spend that money to maximally improve their life.
6:11 Lex Fridman? This too is a counterintuitive notion, but it works time and time again. Like many things, I have so much to learn in this world about challenging problems like this. So philanthropy is definitely one of them. So I should also mention that a bunch of guests, previous guests of this podcast have used GiveDirectly to donate money. Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, and several others. Visit give directly.org/lex to learn more and send cash directly to someone living in extreme poverty. That's give directly.org/lex. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist
6:51 Lex Fridman? takes key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I set the goal of reading one book a week. I said a classic book, but really what I mean is a book that really challenges you and really makes you think. So I look forward to seeing, sort of using Blinkist to help me review the books, actually also choose the books, and maybe help others that are interested in following along with my reading, to get deeper and deeper insights into these different books. I think my perspectives on many books I read are non-standard. I get lost on a single quote here and there, and it just kind of takes me down this whole tangent of
7:34 Lex Fridman? thought, these ideas that get inspired and get sparked. And then I just construct this whole world from a single quote sometimes. But that's what makes it interesting. It's a very subjective experience, like appreciating art, appreciating books, and so on. Anyway, you can claim a special offer for savings at blinkist.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Batul Kachar.
8:20 Lex Fridman? What is the phylogenetic tree, or the evolutionary tree of life? And what can we learn by running it back and studying ancient gene sequences as you have?
8:29 Speaker 01 I think phylogenetic trees could be one of the most 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 another. It itself is an ever-evolving notion. Biologists like visualizations. They like these graphics, these diagrams, and tree of life is one of them.
8:57 Lex Fridman? So the tree starts at a common ancestor?
9:00 Speaker 01 It's actually the other way around. It starts from-
9:03 Lex Fridman? At the end?
9:04 Speaker 01 It starts from the branches. It starts from the tip of the branch, actually. And then depending on what you collected to build the tree. So depending on the branches, depending on what's on the tip of the branch, and I will explain what I mean. The root will be determined by what is really sitting on the tip of the branch of the tree.
9:25 Lex Fridman? So we could study the leaves of the tree by looking at what we have today and then start to reverse engineer, start to move back in time to try to understand what the rest of the tree, what the roots of the tree look like.
9:35 Speaker 01 Exactly. So the tree 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. There are different ways. But in this case, I'm imagining entire diversity of life today is sitting on the tips of the branches of this tree. And we look at, biologists, look at the tree itself. We like to think of it as the topology of the tree to understand when certain organisms or their ancestry may have merged over time. Depending on the tools you use,
10:20 Speaker 01 you might use this tree to then reconstruct the ancestors as well.
10:26 Lex Fridman? 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, in which way have you approached this fascinating problem?
10:41 Speaker 01 We approached it in every way we can. So it's the gene, could be protein, the product of the gene, or species, or could be even groups of species. It will depend, it totally depends on what you want to do with your tree. If you want to understand certain past events, whether an organism exchanged a certain DNA with another one along the course of evolution, you can build your tree accordingly. If you rather use the tree to reconstruct or resurrect ancient DNA, which is what we do, then in our case, for instance, we do both gene, protein and species because we want to compare the tree that we create using these different information.
11:26 Lex Fridman? 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 those ancient organisms back? So the reason I ask that kind of ridiculous sounding question is maybe it gives us context of what we can and can't do by looking back in time.
11:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, so dinosaurs or all these mammals in, at least for us, is the exciting thing already happened by the time we hit to the larger organisms or to eukaryotes.
12:00 Lex Fridman? Or to you, the fun stuff is before we got to the mammal.
12:03 Speaker 01 The fun stuff is what people think is boring, I think. The phase that's, well, at least two different times in the geologic history. One is the first life, past origin of life, how did first life look like? And the second is, why do we think that over certain periods of geologic time, no significant innovation happened to the degree of leaving no record behind?
12:29 Lex Fridman? So what do we not have a record of? Which part? So you say the fun stuff to you is after the origin of life, which we'll talk about after the origin of life. There are single cell organisms, the whole thing with the photosynthesis, the whole thing with the eukaryotes and multicell organisms. And what else is the fun stuff? The whole oxygen thing, which mixes in with the origin of life. There's a bunch of different inventions. All they have to do with is primitive kind of looking organisms that we don't have a good record of.
13:02 Speaker 01 So I will tell you the more interesting things for us. One is the origin of life or what happened right following the emergence of life? How did the first cells look like? And then pretty much anything that we think shaped the environment and was shaped by the environment in a way that impacted the entire planet that enabled you and I to have this conversation. We have very little understanding of the biological innovations that took place in the past of this planet. We work with a very limited set of, I don't want to even say data because they are fossil records. So let's say imprints either that comes from the rock
13:47 Speaker 01 and the rock record itself, or what I just described, these trees that we create and whatever we can infer about the past. So we have two distinct ways that comes from geology and biology, and they each have their limitations.
14:04 Lex Fridman? OK, so right, so there's an interplay. The geology gives you that little bit of data. And then the biology gives you that little bit of kind of constraints and the materials you get to work with to infer, how does this result in the kind of data that we're seeing? And now we can have this through the fog. We can see, we can look back hundreds of millions of years, a couple of billion years and try to infer.
14:31 Speaker 01 Even further. And I like that you said fog. It is pretty foggy what we're doing. And it gets fogger and fogger the more you, the further you try to see into the past. Biology is you basically study the survivors.
14:47 Speaker 01 Broadly speaking.
14:48 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
14:49 Speaker 01 And you're trying to pitch the sort of put together their history based on whatever you can recover today. What makes biology fascinating also let it's erase its own history in a way, right? So you work with this four billion year product. That's genome. That's the DNA. It's great. It's a very dynamic, ever evolving chemical thing. And so you will get some information, but you're not going to get much unless you know where to look.
15:21 Speaker 01 Because it is responding to the environment.
15:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so what we have, that's fascinating. What we have is the survivors, the successful, the successful organisms, even the primitive ones, even the bacteria we have today.
15:36 Speaker 01 So bacteria is not primitive and we.
15:39 Lex Fridman? Sorry, sorry to offend the bacteria.
15:41 Speaker 01 It's, we should be very grateful to bacteria. First of all, they are our great, great ancestors. I like this quote by Douglas Adams, humans don't like their ancestors, they rarely invite them over for dinner.
15:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
15:54 Speaker 01 Right? But bacteria is in your dinner, bacteria is in your gut, bacteria is helping you along the way.
16:00 Lex Fridman? For dinner.
16:00 Speaker 01 We invite them, well, they get themselves invited in a way.
16:03 Lex Fridman? Yes.
16:04 Speaker 01 And so we, and they're definitely older and definitely very sophisticated, very resilient than anything else. As someone working at the, as a bacteriologist, I feel like I need to defend them in this case because they don't get much shout out when we think about life.
16:23 Lex Fridman? So you do study bacteria. So which organisms gives you hints that are alive today that give you hints about what ancient organisms were like? Is it bacteria, is it viruses? What do you study in the lab?
16:36 Speaker 01 We study variety of different bacteria depending on the questions that we ask. We engineer bacteria. So ideally, we want to work with bacteria that we can engineer. Seldom we developed the tools to engineer them. And it depends on the question that we are interested in. If we are interested in connecting the biology and geology to understand the early life and fundamental innovations across billions of years, there are really good candidates like cyanobacteria. So we use cyanobacteria very frequently in the lab. We can engineer its genome. We can perderp its function by poking its own DNA with the foreign DNA
17:20 Speaker 01 that we engineer in the lab. We work with E. coli. It's the most simple in terms of model systems goes. Organism that one can study, well established, sort of a pet, lab pet, that we use it a lot for cloning and for understanding basic functions of the cell, given that it's really well studied.
17:44 Lex Fridman? So, and what you do with that E. coli? You said that you inject it with foreign DNA?
17:49 Speaker 01 We inject pretty much all the bacteria that we work with, with foreign DNA. We also work with diazotrophs. These are azobacteria. They're one of the prime nitrogen fixers, nitrogen fixing bacteria.
18:03 Lex Fridman? Can you explain what that is? Nitrogen fixing, is that, is the source of its energy?
18:07 Speaker 01 So nitrogen is a triple bond gas that's pretty abundant in the atmosphere. But nitrogen itself cannot be directly utilized by cells, given it is triple bond. It needs to be converted to ammonia that is then used for the downstream cellular functions.
18:28 Lex Fridman? And that's what counts as nitrogen fixing.
18:31 Speaker 01 Yes, so nitrogen needs to be fixed before our cells can make use of it. And, and it's.
18:37 Lex Fridman? No offense to nitrogen either.
18:38 Speaker 01 Well, it's actually a very important element. It's one of the most abundant elements on our planet that is used by biology. It's in ATP, it's in chlorophyll, that's uses, that relies on nitrogen. So it's a very important enzyme for a lot of cell functions.
18:58 Lex Fridman? And there's just one mechanism that evolution invented to convert it, to fix it.
19:04 Speaker 01 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 eight different carbon based microbes invented to fix carbon. That's not the case for nitrogen. It's a, it's a singularity across geologic time. We think it evolved around two point seven, maybe, um, roughly three, probably less than three billion year, billion years ago. And that's the only way that nature invented to fix the nitrogen in the atmosphere for the subsequent use.
19:36 Lex Fridman? Would we still have life as we know it today if we didn't invent that nitrogen fixing step?
19:41 Speaker 01 I cannot think of it, no. It's, it's, it's essential to life as we know. You, you and I are having this conversation because life found a way to fix nitrogen.
19:52 Lex Fridman? Is that one of the tougher ones? If you put it sort of, uh, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, what are, in terms of being able to work with these elements, what is the hardest thing? What is the most essential for life? Just to give context.
20:10 Speaker 01 Well, we, we think of this as the cocktail. You may hear.
20:13 Lex Fridman? What's in the cocktail?
20:14 Speaker 01 It's the schnapps, right? Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur. So there are five elements that life relies on. We don't quite know whether that's the only out of many options that life necessarily needs to operate on, but that's just how it, how it happened on our own planet. And there are many abiotic ways to fix nitrogen and like lightning, right? Lightning can accumulate ammonia. Humans found a way about a hundred years ago, I think around World War One, the Haber-Basch process that we can abiotically
20:54 Speaker 01 convert nitrogen into ammonia. Actually, fifty percent of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from the human conversion of nitrogen to ammonia. It's helped, it's the fertilizer that we use, urea, comes from that process. It's, it's in our food. So we helped, we found a way to. Fix our own nitrogen for ourselves.
21:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but that, you know, that's way after the original invention of
21:24 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
21:25 Lex Fridman? And without that, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have all the steps of evolution along the way.
21:30 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. It's very, we tried to replicate in the most simplest way what nature has come up with. Right? We do this by taking nitrogen, using a lot of pressure and then generating ammonia. Life does this in a more sophisticated way, relying on one single enzyme called nitrogenase. It's the nitrogen that is used together with eight electron donor and ATP together with a lot of hydrogen. Life pushes this metabolism down to create fixed nitrogen. It's quite remarkable.
22:06 Lex Fridman? So the lab pet, E. coli, inject them with DNA, those are, so E. coli does nitrogen fixing in part? Or is that with a different one?
22:14 Speaker 01 So some biological engineers engineered E. coli to fix nitrogen, I believe, not, not us. We use the nature's nitrogen, nitrogen fixing bug and engineer it with the nitrogen fixing metabolism that we resurrected using our computational and phylogenetic tools.
22:36 Lex Fridman? How complicated are these little organisms? What, what, what are we talking about?
22:39 Speaker 01 Depends on how we define complication.
22:42 Lex Fridman? Okay, so I, I could tell that you appreciate and respect the full complexity of even the most seemingly primitive organisms, because none of them are primitive. Okay. That said, what, what kind of, what, what are we talking about? How, how, um, what kind of machineries do they have that you're working with when you're injecting them with DNA?
23:07 Speaker 01 So I will start with one of the most fascinating machineries that we target, which is the translation machinery. It is a very unique subsystem of cellular life in comparison to, I would say, metabolism. And we used to
23:28 Speaker 01 You know, when we are thinking about cellular life, we think of cell as the basic unit or the building block. But from a key perspective, that's not the case. That one may argue that everything that happens inside the cell serves the translation and the translation machinery. There is a nice paper that called this, that the entire cell is hopelessly addicted to this main informatic computing biological chemical system that is operating at the heart of the cell.
24:06 Lex Fridman? Which is the translation?
24:07 Speaker 01 It is the translation.
24:08 Lex Fridman? What's translation from what to what? So RNA to enzymes?
24:13 Speaker 01 It converts a linear sequence of mRNA into a folded, later folded protein. That's, that's when the, that's the core processing center for information, for life. It's, has multiple steps. It initiates, it elongates, it terminates, and it recycles. It operates discreet bits of information. It's itself is like a chemical decoding device. And that is incredibly unique for translation that I don't think you will find anywhere else in the cell that does this.
24:56 Lex Fridman? So even though it's called translation, it's really like a factory that reads the schematic and builds a three dimensional object. It's like a printer.
25:08 Speaker 01 I would divide it into actually even four more additional steps or disciplines than what would it take to study it by the way you described it. It's a chemical system. It's the compounds that make it up are chemicals. It's physical. It's attracts the energy to make its job, to do its job. It's informatic. What is processed are the bits. It's computational. The discrete states that the system is placed when the information is being processed, that's itself is computational. And it's biological. It's a, there's variability and inheritance that come from imperfect replication even and imperfect computation.
25:54 Speaker 01 So you're
25:54 Lex Fridman? Man, that's so good. So from the biology comes the like when you mess up, the bugs are the features. That's the biology. Informatics is obvious in RNA. That's a set of information there. The different steps along the way is actually kind of what the computer does with with bits. It's done computation. Physical, there's a, I guess, like almost like a mechanical process to the whole thing. It requires energy and actually, you know, it's manipulating actual physical objects. And chemicals, because you have to ultimately, it's all chemistry.
26:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it tracks this information. So it is almost a mini computer device inside ourselves.
26:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
26:38 Speaker 01 And that's the oldest computational device of life. It's it's likely the key operation system that had to evolve for life to emerge.
26:52 Lex Fridman? It's a more interesting
26:56 Lex Fridman? or it's more complicated in interesting ways than the computers we have today. I mean, everything you said, which is really, really nice. I mean, I guess our computers have the informatic and they have the computational, but they don't have the chemical, the physical or the biology.
27:10 Speaker 01 Exactly. And and the computers don't have, don't link information to function. Right? They are not tightly coupled, no very close to what translation
27:22 Speaker 01 or the way translation does it. So that's the number one, I think, difference between the two. And yes, it's it's informatic and we can discuss this further too.
27:34 Lex Fridman? 100%. Let's please discuss this further. Which part are we discussing further? Each one of those are fascinating worlds, each of the five.
27:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, so well, we can start with the more, I guess, the the ones that are more established, which is the the chemical aspect of the translation machinery. It's the the specific compounds make up the assembly of RNA. Chemists showed this in many different ways. We can rip apart the entire machinery. We know that at the core of it, there's an RNA that's
28:08 Speaker 01 That operates not only as an information, an information system itself or information itself, but also as an enzyme. And, and origin of life chemists make these molecules easily now. We know we can manipulate RNA, we can make even with single pot chemistries, we can create compounds.
28:25 Lex Fridman? What's a single pot chemistry?
28:27 Speaker 01 Um, that's, I would say when you add all the recipes that you know that will lead you to the final product.
28:34 Lex Fridman? This is what origin of life chemists do is they, they come up with this pot, they throw a bunch of chemicals in and they try to, try to, they're basically chefs of a certain kind.
28:44 Speaker 01 I'm not sure if that's what they call it, but that's how I think of it. Because it is all combined in a test tube and you know the outcome. And, and it's, it's very mathematical. Once you know the right environment and the right chemistry that needs to get into this container or this pot, uh, you know what the outcome is, there is no luck there anymore. It's a pretty rigid, established, uh, input, output system and it's all chemistry.
29:07 Lex Fridman? So you actually wear a lot of hats. Is one of them, uh, origin of life chemist?
29:12 Speaker 01 My PhD is in chemistry, but I don't do, uh, origin of life chemistry.
29:16 Lex Fridman? But you're interested in origin of life?
29:18 Speaker 01 Yes, absolutely.
29:19 Lex Fridman? So some of your, some of your best friends are origin of life chemists?
29:23 Speaker 01 Just make sure that you have good chemist friends if you're interested in origin of life.
29:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
29:27 Speaker 01 That's a hundred percent requirement, it should be mandatory.
29:32 Lex Fridman? Okay, so chemistry, uh, so what else about this machinery that we need to know chemically?
29:36 Speaker 01 Well, uh, chemically, I think that that's it. You have enzymes, you have proteins, enzymes are doing their thing. They, they know how to chew energy using ATP or GTP. They, they, they know what to do on their, in their own way. They do their enzymatic thing. Uh, so it's not just the, the ribosome that is at the heart of the translation, but there are a lot of different proteins. You're looking about a hundred different components that compose this machinery.
30:04 Lex Fridman? Uh, well, let me ask kind of, maybe it's a ridiculous question, but did the chemistry make this machine? Or did the machine use chemistry to achieve a purpose? So like, um, I guess there's a lot of different chemical possibilities on earth.
30:26 Lex Fridman? Is this translation machinery just like choosing, picking and choosing different chemical reactions that it can use to achieve a purpose? Or did the chemistry basically like, there's like a momentum, like a constraint to the thing that can only build a certain kind of machinery? Basically, is chemistry fundamental? Or is it just emergent? Like, how important is chemistry to this whole process?
30:57 Speaker 01 You cannot have a life without chemistry. You cannot have any cellular process without chemistry. What makes life interesting is that even if the chemistry is imperfect, even if there are accidents along the way, if something binds to another chemical in a way it shouldn't, there is resilience within the system that it can maybe not necessarily repair itself, but it moves on. However, imperfect mistakes can be handled.
31:26 Lex Fridman? That's where the biology.
31:27 Speaker 01 That's where the biology comes in. But in terms of chemistry, you absolutely cannot have a translation machinery without chemistry. And so, as I said, there are four main steps. These are the core steps that are conserved in all translation machinery. And I should say, all life has this machine, right? Every cell, everything.
31:46 Lex Fridman? On earth.
31:47 Speaker 01 On earth.
31:48 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
31:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
31:50 Lex Fridman? When you think of this machine, do you think very specifically about the kind of machinery that we're talking about? Or do you think more philosophically, a machine that converts information into function?
32:01 Speaker 01 I cannot separate the two. I think what makes this machinery fascinating is that those five components that I listed are, they coexist. So, for instance, if we, let's just, talking about the chemistry part.
32:19 Speaker 01 We know the certain rate constant, all these proteins that operate in this machinery needs to harbor in order to get the mechanism going, right? If you are bringing the information to the translation machinery and you're the initiator of this computation system, you need to have, you can only afford a certain range of mistakes. If you're too fast, then the next message cannot be delivered fast. If you're too slow, you may stall the process. So there is definitely a chemistry constant going on within the machinery.
33:00 Speaker 01 Again, it's not perfect, far from it, but they all have their own margin of error that they can tolerate versus they cannot, otherwise they collapse, the system collapses.
33:11 Lex Fridman? So it's like a jazz ensemble, the notes of the chemistry, but you can be a little off.
33:17 Speaker 01 I love that you said jazz, it's definitely true. It's a party and it's like everybody's invited and they need to operate together, right? And what's really cool about it, I think, 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? So you can get cell-free translation systems, put this translation in a test tube and it is doing its thing. It doesn't need the rest of the cell to translate information. Of course, you need to feed the information, at least so far, but because we are far from
33:58 Speaker 01 evolving a translation, maybe not so far, evolving a translation in the lab or a machinery that can process information as it generates it, we have not done that yet.
34:10 Lex Fridman? It's a pretty complicated machinery, so it's hard for those origin of life chemists to find a pot that generates.
34:17 Speaker 01 Because it's far more than chemistry. You need biology, obviously. You need biochemistry. You need to think as I think a network systems folk. You need to think about computation. You need to think about information. And that is not happening yet, except we are trying to bring this perspective. But the more you understand how information systems work, you cannot, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It's one of those things.
34:46 Lex Fridman? So but you could still rip it out and the chemistry happens?
34:49 Speaker 01 Yes. And chemistry can happen even with, even if you strip some of the parts out. It can, you can get very minimal level of information processing that does not look anything like the translation that cells rely on, but that, but chemists showed from linear, you can generate information that arrives to a processing center in the form of a linear polymer. But the informatic part of this system that I think sets it apart from computation and from metabolism comes in if you think about the information itself, right?
35:29 Speaker 01 So we have four nucleotide letters that compose DNA and they are processed in the translation in triplets. So you have in triplet codon fragments. So you have four times four times four. So you have sixty four possible states that can be encoded by four letters in three positions.
35:54 Speaker 01 All right, so.
35:55 Lex Fridman? It's so amazing.
35:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:56 Lex Fridman? It's so amazing.
35:57 Speaker 01 There is only one code that says start. That's the, that there's only one. And then there's two, if not three, that says stop. So that's, that's, that's what you work with. But you can have sixty four possible states, but life only uses twenty amino acids. So we use six, life uses sixty four possible states minus four of the starts and stops to code for twenty amino acids in different combinations. That is really amazing. If you think about, there are five hundred different amino acids life can choose, right?
36:35 Speaker 01 Narrowed it down to twenty. We don't know why. A lot of people think about this genetic code is quite fascinating.
36:41 Lex Fridman? So far, right?
36:42 Speaker 01 I mean, it didn't do it for four billion years. I don't know. We may wait for another four billion years, but.
36:46 Lex Fridman? But you didn't have those amino acids in the very beginning, right?
36:49 Speaker 01 We don't know. So we would be fooling ourselves if we said we know exactly how many amino acids existed early on. But there's no reason to think that it wasn't the same.
37:01 Lex Fridman? Or similar.
37:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, we don't have a good reason. But because roughly twenty out of sixty states are used, you're using one third of your possible states in your information system. So this may seem like a waste, but informatically it's important because it's abundant and it is redundant, right? So this code degeneracy, you see this in that's implemented by this translation missionary inside the cell. So it means you can make errors, right? You can make errors, but the message will still get through. You can speak, missing some letters to the information can miss some parts, but the message will still get through.
37:46 Speaker 01 So that's two thirds of the not used states gives you that robustness and resilience within the system.
37:53 Lex Fridman? So at the informatic level, there's room for error. There's probably room for error, probably in all five
38:01 Lex Fridman? categories that we're talking about. There's probably room for error in the computation. There's probably room for error.
38:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's. Yes, exactly.
38:07 Lex Fridman? Everywhere there's room for error.
38:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, because the informatic capacity is made possible together with the other components. And not only that, but also the product yields a function, no?
38:22 Speaker 01 In this case, enzyme or protein, right? So. That's really amazing for me.
38:28 Lex Fridman? It is. I mean, in my head, just so you know, because I'm a computer science AI person, the parallels between even like language models that encode language, or now they're able to encode basically any kind of thing, including images and actions, all in this kind of way. The parallel in terms of informatic and computation is just incredible.
38:56 Speaker 01 Actually, I have a image. Maybe I can send you.
39:00 Lex Fridman? Can we pull it up now?
39:01 Speaker 01 If you just do genetic codon charts, we can pull that up. Yeah, it's a very standard table. So I can, I can explain what, why this is so amazing. So you're looking at, like, this is life's alphabet, right? And so I also want to make a very quick link now to your first question, the tree of life. When, when we link, when we try to understand ancient languages, right? Or the cultures of, or the cultures that use these extinct languages, we start with the modern languages, right? So we look at Indo-European languages and try to understand certain words
39:41 Speaker 01 and make trees to understand, you know, this is what Slavic word is for snow, something like snig.
39:49 Lex Fridman? Now we jumped to languages that humans spoke in human history.
39:52 Speaker 01 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 imagine that it was snowy, that's why they needed that word. It's the same thing for biology, right? If, if they have some, if we understand some function about that enzyme, we can understand the environment that they lived in. It's, it's the similar, it's similar in that sense. So now you're looking at the alphabet for, of life. In this case, it's not 20 or 25 letters, it's, you have four letters. So what is really interesting that stands out to me when I look at this,
40:34 Speaker 01 on the other shell, you're looking at the 20 amino acids that compose life, right? The one, the methionine that you see, that's the start. So the start is always the same. To me, that is fascinating, that all life starts with the same starts. There is no other start code. So you send the A G, you know, A U G to the cell. That when that information arrives, the translation knows, all right, I gotta start. Function is coming. The following this is a chain of information until the stop code arrives, which are highlighted in black squares.
41:10 Lex Fridman? So for people just listening, we're looking at a standard RNA colored table organized in a wheel. There's an outer shell and there's an inner shell, all using the four letters that we're talking about. And with that, we can compose all of the amino acids and there's a start and there's a stop. And presumably you put together the, with these letters, you walk around the wheel to put together the words, the sentences that make.
41:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, the words, the sentences. And you, again, you get one start, you get three, there are three different ways to stop this, one way to start it. And for each letter, you have multiple options. So you say you have a code A, the second code can be another A. And even if you mess that up, you still can rescue yourself. So you can get, for instance, I'm looking at the lysine K. You get an A and you get an A and then you get an A that gives you the lysine. Right? But if you get an A and if you get an A and I get a G, you still get the lysine. So there are different combinations. So even if there's an error, we don't know if these are selected because they were error ness and somehow they got locked down.
42:17 Speaker 01 We don't know if there is a mechanism behind this to, or we certainly don't know this definitively. But this is informatic part of this. And notice that the colors in some tables too, the colors will be coded in a way that the type of the nucleotide can be similar chemically. But the point is that you will still end up with the same amino acids or something similar to it, even if you mess up the code.
42:45 Lex Fridman? Do we understand the mechanism, how natural selection interplays with this resilience to error?
42:52 Speaker 01 So
42:53 Lex Fridman? Which errors result in the same output, like the same function and which don't, which actually results in a dysfunction or which are
43:04 Speaker 01 We understand to some degree the how translation and the rest of the cell work together. How an error at the translation level, this is the really core level, can impact entire cell. But we understand very little about the evolutionary mechanisms behind the selection of the system. It's thought to be as one of the hardest problems in biology and it is still the dark side of biology. We even though it is so essential. So this is, yeah, you're looking at the language of life, so to speak, and how it can found ways rather to tolerate its own mistakes.
43:48 Lex Fridman? So the entire phylogenetic tree can be like deconstructed with this wheel of language.
43:57 Speaker 01 Because all the final letters, those are, that's the 20 amino acids, that's our alphabet. They are all brought together with these bits of information, right? So you, when you look at the genes, you're looking at those four letters. When you look at the proteins, you're looking at the 20 amino acids, which may be a little easier way to track the information when we create the tree.
44:20 Lex Fridman? So using this language, we can describe all life that's lived on Earth.
44:26 Speaker 01 I wish.
44:27 Lex Fridman? One perspective.
44:28 Speaker 01 It's, we are not that good at it yet, right?
44:31 Lex Fridman? So in theory, this is one way to look at life on Earth.
44:35 Speaker 01 If you're a biologist and you want to understand how life evolved from a molecular perspective, this would be the way to do it. And, and this is what nature narrowed its code down to. So when we think of nitrogen, when we think of carbon, when we think of sulfur, it's all in this, that the, all these nucleotides are built based on those elements.
45:00 Lex Fridman? And this is fundamentally the informatic perspective.
45:03 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's, that's the informatic perspective. And it's important to emphasize that this is not engineered by humans. This is, this evolved by itself.
45:14 Lex Fridman? Like, right, humans didn't invent this just because we were just describing, we're trying to find, trying to describe the language of life.
45:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it appears to be a highly optimized chemical and information code. It may indicate that a great deal of chemical evolution and this may indicate that a lot of selection pressure and Darwinian evolution happened with prior to the rise of last universal common ancestor. Because this is almost a bridge that connects the earliest cells to the last universal common ancestor.
45:50 Lex Fridman? Okay, can you describe what the heck you just said? So this mechanism evolved before the what common ancestor?
46:00 Speaker 01 So there's the-
46:00 Lex Fridman? The last universal common ancestor.
46:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, so when we talk about the tree, when we think about the root, if you ideally included all the living information, or all the available information that comes from living organisms on your tree, then it, on the root of your tree, lies the last universal common ancestor, LUCA, right?
46:21 Lex Fridman? Why last? Last universal? Because the earlier universe, it also had trees, but they all died off.
46:29 Speaker 01 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?
46:39 Lex Fridman? There's one, there was one organism that started the whole thing.
46:43 Speaker 01 It's more like a, I would think of it as more like a population, a group of organisms than a single-
46:48 Lex Fridman? Okay, hold on a second. I tweeted this, so I want to know the accuracy of my tweet. All right. Sometimes, early in the morning, I tweet very pothead-like things. I said that we all evolved from one-
47:04 Lex Fridman? Common ancestor though was a single cell organism 3.5 billion years ago. Something like this. How, how true is that tweet? Do I need to delete it? No, that's actually correct. I mean, I think, of course, there's a lot to say, which is like, we don't know exactly. But what, to what degrees that the, the single organism aspect is that true? Versus multiple organisms?
47:33 Speaker 01 Do you want me to be?
47:35 Lex Fridman? Brutally honest? Yes, please. This, there's still time. This, this is how we get like caveats and tweets.
47:44 Speaker 01 All right. So first of all, it's not, 3.5 is still a very conservative estimate.
47:49 Lex Fridman? In which direction?
47:51 Speaker 01 I would say it's 3.8 is probably safer to say at this point.
47:56 Lex Fridman? A bunch of people said it probably way before.
47:58 Speaker 01 If you put an approximately, I'll take that.
48:01 Lex Fridman? I didn't. I just love the idea that I was once, first of all, as a single organism, I was once a cell.
48:10 Speaker 01 Well, you're still as, you're a group of cells.
48:13 Lex Fridman? No, but I started from a single cell. Me, Lex.
48:17 Speaker 01 You mean like you versus Luca? Are you relating to Luca right now?
48:21 Lex Fridman? No, no, no. I'm relating to my like.
48:23 Speaker 01 Your own development.
48:24 Lex Fridman? My own development. I started from a single cell. It's like, it like built up and stuff. Okay. That, and then, so that's a for single biological organism. And then from an evolutionary perspective, the Luca, like I start, like my ancestor is a single cell. And then here I am sitting half asleep tweeting. Like I started from a single cell, evolved a ton of murder along the way to lead the, this like brutal search for adaptation through the 3.5.8 billion years.
49:01 Speaker 01 So you, you defy the code of dogma systems. You are proud of your ancestors and you invite them over to dinner and you invite them over to your Twitter.
49:08 Lex Fridman? Yeah. And it's amazing that this intelligence, to the degree you can call it intelligence emerged to be able to tweet whatever the heck I want.
49:16 Speaker 01 Yes. It's, it's almost intelligence at the chemical level. And this is also probably one of the first chemically intelligent.
49:25 Speaker 01 System that evolved by itself in nature.
49:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so you see that translation is fundamentally like intelligent mechanism.
49:34 Speaker 01 In in its own way, and and again, the if if we manage to figure out how to drive life's evolution. In in it can, if it can evolve a sophisticated sort of informatic.
49:52 Speaker 01 Processing system like this, you may ask yourself, what might chemical systems be capable of independently doing? Under different circumstances.
50:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so like locally, they're intelligent locally. They don't need the rest of the shebang. Like, they don't need the big.
50:11 Speaker 01 They need, so that that's that's a great segue into what makes this biological, right? The the heart of the cellular activities are translation. You kill translation, you kill the cell.
50:23 Lex Fridman? Yes.
50:23 Speaker 01 You not only the translation itself, you kill. The component that initiates it, you kill the cell. You kill, you remove the component that elongates it, you kill the cell. So there are many different ways to disrupt this machinery. They all the part, all the parts are important. And now it it can vary across different organisms. We see variation between bacteria versus eukaryotes versus archaea. Right? So it is not the same, it's same exact steps, but. It can get more crowded as we get closer to eukaryotes, for instance. But you are still computing about twenty amino acids per second, right? This is this is what you're generating every second.
51:05 Lex Fridman? That's a single machinery is doing twenty a second?
51:07 Speaker 01 Twenty yes, twenty one for bacteria, I believe eight for eukaryotes or nine.
51:11 Lex Fridman? Twenty one a second. I mean, that's super inefficient or super efficient, depending on how you think about it.
51:17 Speaker 01 I think it's great. I mean, I can.
51:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but it's way slower than a computer could generate a simulation.
51:24 Speaker 01 I, I think if you can show me a computer that does this, we are done here.
51:28 Lex Fridman? Well, this is the big, this includes the five things, not just, but I could show you a computer that's doing the informatic, right?
51:36 Speaker 01 I, yes, you can show me that, but you cannot show me the one that has all.
51:40 Lex Fridman? For now.
51:42 Speaker 01 For now.
51:42 Lex Fridman? I will ask you about probably what, uh, alpha fold, right?
51:47 Speaker 01 I think the more we learn about, and this, this is why early life and origin is also very fascinating and applicable to many different disciplines. There is no way you see this the way we just described it unless you think about early life and early geochemistry and earliest emergent systems. But going, going back to the biological component,
52:13 Speaker 01 all of these attributes that we think about life, or that we associate with biology, stems from translation and as well as metabolism. But I see metabolism as a way to keep translation going and translation keeps metabolism going. But translation is arguably a bit more sophisticated process for the reasons that I just described.
52:38 Lex Fridman? So metabolism is a source of energy for this translation process?
52:41 Speaker 01 It's a, it's a, it's a way to process materials and it is inherently dynamic. And it is flexible, but it is not focused on repetition as translation does. So that's the main difference. Translation is the kind of in a way, just it repeats, right? So you have the metabolism that can synthesize materials, it creates or benefits from available energy. And again, it's a dynamic system. And then you have computation that it, that is inherently repetitive, right? Needs to carry out repetitive processes. And it does the tasks and it's, it implements an algorithm, but it is not dynamic. So you see both of those attributes in translation combined.
53:25 Speaker 01 It is repetitive and it is dynamic. And it also processes this information. So they are fundamentally different. I don't know if you can get life if you don't find a way to process the information around you.
53:43 Lex Fridman? In a repetitive dynamic way.
53:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, and somehow that that's what got selected, maybe not selected, I don't know if it was accidental, but that that's what it seems to be conserved for four billion years, that that's what life established.
53:59 Lex Fridman? What's the connection between translation and the self-replication, which seems to be another weird thing that life just started doing, wanting to just replicate itself.
54:09 Speaker 01 I think when we truly understand the answer to that question, we may have just made ourselves life, right? We I don't think we know quite how translation machinery as a whole fits into equation. Because so we we try to understand ribosomes, RNA, how the linear information is processed.
54:32 Speaker 01 All the genetic code, why this code code on's not others, why twenty not more, not less. And we are sort of moving towards transition, that's that's what we are working on anyway. To finally look at the patterns in which this system operates itself. And if you understand that, you're really unlocking a very emergent behavior.
54:55 Lex Fridman? One of the things you didn't mention is physical. Is there something to mention about that component? That's interesting.
55:01 Speaker 01 There's actually a paper published in twenty thirteen, I want to say the first author is Zirnov. So they surveyed
55:13 Speaker 01 computational engineered systems level computation, energy consumption. Okay, and they tried to understand whether the universe is using its own or life is using its full capacity of energy consumption and whether if different planets in the universe had life, would the capacity would increase or decrease? Does life operate at its energy maximum? And and they think that it does, that it actually operates at an efficiency that is far more above and beyond any computational system.
55:51 Lex Fridman? How is that possible to determine at all?
55:53 Speaker 01 That you tell me. That's why I dropped the citation. I I found the citation. It's quite an interesting paper. It's a bit, you know, it's a um and it's a, obviously, you can only calculate and infer these things, but.
56:07 Lex Fridman? It's a good question to ask. Is the life that we see here on Earth and life elsewhere in the universe, is it using the energy most efficiently?
56:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
56:19 Lex Fridman? It seems to be very efficient. Again, if we compare to computers, it seems to be incredibly efficient at using.
56:25 Speaker 01 I think they they look at the like the theoretical optimum for electronic devices.
56:29 Lex Fridman? Got it.
56:30 Speaker 01 And then try to understand where life falls on on this, and life is certainly more efficient.
56:36 Lex Fridman? And that's ultimately the physical side. How well are you using for this entire mechanism? The energy available to you. And so, given, given all the resilience to errors and all that kind of stuff, it seems that it's close to its maximum.
56:49 Speaker 01 Yep.
56:50 Lex Fridman? And this this paper aside, it does seem that life, obviously, that's the constraint we have on Earth, right, is the amount of energy.
56:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:00 Lex Fridman? 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 there. How do you? How do you personally define life? Do you have a? Do you have a favorite definition that you try to sneak up on?
57:22 Speaker 01 Um.
57:23 Lex Fridman? Is it possible?
57:24 Speaker 01 I.
57:25 Lex Fridman? To define life on Earth?
57:26 Speaker 01 I don't know. It depends on what you are defining it for. If you're defining it for finding different life forms, then it probably needs to have some quantification in it so that you can. Use it in whatever the mission that you're operating.
57:43 Lex Fridman? You mean like it's not binary, it's a, this is like a seven out of 10.
57:49 Speaker 01 Life, lifelike.
57:50 Lex Fridman? Lifelike.
57:52 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't, I don't think that defining is that essential. I think it's a good exercise. But I'm not sure if the, if we need to agree a universally defined way of understanding life. Because the definition itself seems to be ever evolving anyway, right? We have the NASA's definition. It's, it's, it has its minuses and pluses, but it seems to be doing its job.
58:19 Lex Fridman? Well, what, what are the different, if there is a line and it's impossible or unproductive to define that line. Nevertheless, we know it 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 and other planets. So how do we try to identify if a thing is living when we go to Mars, when we go to the different moons in our solar system, or we go outside our solar system to look for life.
58:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:56 Lex Fridman? Other planets.
58:57 Speaker 01 It's unlikely to be a sort of a smoking gun event, right? It's not gonna be, hey, I found this.
59:03 Lex Fridman? You don't think so?
59:04 Speaker 01 I don't think so. Unless you find an elephant on some exoplanet, then I can say, yeah, that's, there's life here.
59:10 Lex Fridman? No, but isn't there a dynamic nature to the thing? Like it moves? It has a membrane that looks like there's stuff inside.
59:21 Speaker 01 It doesn't need to move, right? I mean, like, look at plants. I mean, they, they grow, but there are plants that are, can be also pretty dormant. And arguably, they are the most, they do everything that, one of my favorite professors once said, that the plant does everything that a giraffe does without moving. So movement is not.
59:41 Lex Fridman? Zen statement.
59:42 Speaker 01 Necessarily.
59:43 Lex Fridman? But on a certain time scale, the, the plant does move, it just moves slower.
59:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
59:48 Lex Fridman? It moves pretty.
59:49 Speaker 01 I would, I would say that, and, and, and it's hard to quantify this or even measure it, but it is a, um. Life is definitely the chemistry finding solutions, right? So it is chemistry exploring itself.
1:00:05 Speaker 01 And maintaining this exploration for billions of years.
1:00:09 Lex Fridman? So, okay, so a planet is a bunch of chemistry. And then you run it and say, all right, figure out what cool stuff you can come up with. That's essentially what life is. Given a chemistry, what is the cool stuff I can come up with?
1:00:25 Speaker 01 If that chemistry or the solutions that it embarks upon are maintained in a form of memory.
1:00:34 Speaker 01 Right? So it's the, you don't just need to have the explore, exploring chemical space, but you need to also maintain a memory of some of those solutions for over long periods of time. So that's the memory component makes it more living to me. Because chemistry can always sample, right? So chemistry is chemistry. But are you just constantly sampling? Or are you building on your former solutions? And then maintaining a memory of those solutions over billions of years? Or at least that's what happened here.
1:01:09 Lex Fridman? Chemistry can't build life if it's always living in the moment. The physicist will be very upset with you. Okay. So memory could be a fundamental.
1:01:21 Speaker 01 I mean, life is not just, I mean, life is obviously chemistry and physics leading to biology. So this is not a disciplinary problem of one discipline triumphing other discipline. It's the, but what, what you need to have is definitely, I mean, chemistry is everywhere, right? I tend to think you can be a chemist. 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.
1:01:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 So, so definitely something very fundamental happened here. And you cannot take biology out of the equation. If you want to understand how that vast chemistry space, how that general sequence space got narrowed down to what was, what is available or what is used by life, you need to understand the rules of selection. And that's when evolution and biology comes into play.
1:02:17 Lex Fridman? So the, the rules of natural selection operate to you on the level of biology?
1:02:23 Speaker 01 Rules, I don't know if there are any rules like that. It would be fascinating to find in terms of the biology's rules. That's a very interesting and it's a very fascinating area of study now. And probably we will hear more about that decades to come. But if you wanna go from the broad to specific, you need to understand the rules of selection. And that is gonna come from understanding biology, yes.
1:02:50 Lex Fridman? Well, actually, let me ask you about selection. You have a paper on evolutionary stalling, where you described that evolution is not good at multitasking. Or like in populations that evolve quickly. I mean, it's a very specific thing, but there could be a generalizable fundamental thing to this, that evolution is not able to improve multiple modules simultaneously. I guess the question is, what part of the organism does evolution quote unquote focus on to improve?
1:03:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was the driving question. We meddled with the part where you shouldn't be messing up with translation. This is the...
1:03:31 Lex Fridman? Should or should not?
1:03:33 Speaker 01 You shouldn't. As I said, there are many ways to break it and all life needs it.
1:03:37 Lex Fridman? That's what one of the things, your favorite thing to do is to break life, see what happens?
1:03:43 Speaker 01 It's, yeah, because that's how kids learn, right? So you have to break something and then see how it will... Then you do it over and over again to see if it will fix itself in the same ways.
1:03:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:03:53 Speaker 01 So that's, it's our, I don't know, it's the most fundamental properties of ourselves as human beings. So if we shouldn't break translation, then we should try to break it.
1:04:02 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:04:02 Speaker 01 To see how it will repair.
1:04:04 Lex Fridman? So which part do you break?
1:04:05 Speaker 01 I broke elongation, so...
1:04:07 Lex Fridman? What's the role of elongation in this process?
1:04:10 Speaker 01 So we have four steps of the translation. Initiate, elongate, so elongate the chain, of the information chain that you're now creating, the peptide chain, or let's say broadly polymer chain. And there's the termination step and there's the recycling. So all of these steps are carried out by proteins that are also named after these steps. Initiation is initiation factor protein. Elongation is the elongator protein. We broke elongation.
1:04:47 Speaker 01 So the cell, the starting codon could still arrive to where it's supposed to go. But the following information couldn't get carried out because we replaced elongation with its own ancestral version. So we inserted roughly a 700 million year old elongation factor protein. After removing the modern gene. So we made this ancient, modern, hybrid organism.
1:05:21 Lex Fridman? And that essentially creates, in some way, the ancient version of that organism?
1:05:26 Speaker 01 I wouldn't say so. It's a hybrid organism. It's not necessarily, because the rest of this cell, the rest of the genome is still modern. And that goes back to the difference between Jurassic Park. There are many differences, obviously, given that this is not fiction, we're doing it. But also, we are not necessarily, I think in Jurassic Park, they are taking an ancient, they find an ancient organism and then put a modern gene inside the ancient organism. In our case, we are still working with what we got, but putting an ancestral DNA inside the modern organism.
1:06:02 Lex Fridman? So you're like taking a new car and putting an old engine into it?
1:06:06 Speaker 01 In a way, yeah, yes.
1:06:08 Lex Fridman? Seeing what happens.
1:06:09 Speaker 01 Yes, but in our case, it's more like Transformer than just a regular car, which is doing things.
1:06:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so it's a more complicated organism than just a car.
1:06:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:20 Lex Fridman? I got it. So what does that, what does that teach you?
1:06:25 Speaker 01 We wanted to understand multiple things. One is how does the cell respond to perturbation? And we didn't just put the ancient DNA. We inserted, we sampled DNA from currently existing organisms, so the cousins of this microbe, and collected DNA sequences from the cousins as well. So both ancestor and the current cousin DNA, so to speak. And engineered all of these things to the modern bacteria and generated a collection of microbes that either have the ancient component or the variant elongator component that's still alive today, but coming from a different part of the tree.
1:07:08 Lex Fridman? So you broke elongation?
1:07:11 Lex Fridman? Was that something you did as part of the paper on evolutionary stalling to try to figure out how evolution figures out what to try to improve? Did that help?
1:07:21 Speaker 01 Yes, because we were not supposed to mess with the translation. That's exactly what we did. 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, near branch, far branch, to compare to the organism that we're working with, cousins, distant cousins, as well as the ancestors of the bacteria that we are now modifying.
1:07:57 Lex Fridman? How much different variation is there in that elongation step? Like, what are the different flavors of elongation?
1:08:03 Speaker 01 That's a very good question. So mechanistically or mechanically, it's the same. It's very conserved. So all life elongates the same way. You are, it's nothing but a shuttle. You just carry and the chemical with you, the bit, to the heart of the machine.
1:08:22 Lex Fridman? Is it essentially doing like a copy paste operation?
1:08:25 Speaker 01 It has its tail that's attached to the code, which is then carried biochemically to the linear chain to the core of ribosome. And it sits on there, it's released and the peptides click, the codes rather click. Once that chemistry that's at the tail end occurs, the protein leaves the center. So you can imagine it's like it hops in there and hops out. And when it hops and hops out, it leaves the information behind. That's all it does. It's bring the information, get out of there. And it's all triggered by biophysics, biochemistry,
1:09:06 Speaker 01 because of the way the enzyme chews energy, in this case, GTP, how the phosphor leaves the center that kicks, that gives the additional kick to the enzyme to leave the center.
1:09:19 Lex Fridman? So which parts are different then? Where's the flavors of different flavors of elongation?
1:09:24 Speaker 01 Usually, the parts that matter don't change over time. Nature conserves the sites of these proteins that are important for its job. If there's a difference, then we we wanna know, especially if if there's a difference between two cousins. And in we look at the sites that interact with the most important parts of this machinery. If we see any difference, we tend to mutate or we revert, we engineer that part, we alter that part because it gives us a clue that there must be something interesting going on here or not.
1:09:57 Lex Fridman? Okay, so that's not the the fundamental part of the machinery, but it's some flavorful characteristic that you can play with.
1:10:05 Speaker 01 So now you stripped the machinery down to its parts, and now you're looking at the parts of the parts.
1:10:09 Lex Fridman? Okay.
1:10:10 Speaker 01 And it depends where you're looking and how you're looking and what you're looking at. But usually, we see up to seventy percent level 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. So you're looking at a three point eight billion year old mechanism. And when we look at the ancestors that we resurrect, we see about forty percent identity. So the identity definitely decreases as you go back in time, but still sixty percent shared information over four billion year is is pretty good.
1:10:54 Lex Fridman? Is that just for elongation or for the entire translation?
1:10:57 Speaker 01 Depends on what you do. So for initiation, we've also recently published this. It's a different story. But overall, you see high level of identity that that is kept intact, especially if the component is essential for life.
1:11:13 Lex Fridman? Okay, so forty percent and sixty seventy percent, you said, but like from generation to generation, how does evolution, and presumably that's what that paper is looking at, is the parts of the parts?
1:11:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:11:25 Lex Fridman? How does how does it? Uh, able to say like mess with the parts and try to come up with a cooler, improved version of the organism.
1:11:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, so let me describe to you what we did in that experiment. We took a different, we took bacteria. We perdupt the elongation in all of these with different variants. So we had an initial set of, um, a group of bacteria that we had. We then subjected these bacteria to evolution in the lab. All right, so we, uh, first of all, we knew we broke it because upon engineering, we measured what's going on with the cell. It's not growing as well. They're not healthy. We can see it with our eyes. We can measure it that if they were generating an offspring every 20 minutes, now it is 40 minutes, right? So we really messed them up. They don't wanna work with this thing. They don't want each other, but they need each other.
1:12:16 Speaker 01 So we created that situation for them, which is good because we want, uh, to see how, uh, we wanted to see how they will cooperate with each other, uh, to fix this problem. Because we know that that's not the condition that they wanna live in, especially when they know what they can do. So with that, we subjected these organisms to evolution in the lab. That's, uh, we refer to this as experimental evolution. We subject bacteria to different suction pressure, project them through bottlenecks. Every day, we randomly collect a handful of bacteria from the flask,
1:13:00 Speaker 01 give them, put them in a new fresh environment with fresh food, keep them in this environment for 24 hours until they reach a more dormant state. And then we subject, introduce them to a new environment. So we repeated this for about it. Um, I will say 150 days. So every day, not nonstop, we repeated this experiment.
1:13:22 Lex Fridman? Some kind of. Uh, how much, uh, how many different kinds of environments are there?
1:13:27 Speaker 01 We, we kept the environments to the same, uh, because we had different initial conditions. We kept the environment constant, same temperature, same food, same source of carbon. Uh, but we, uh, created replicas for each, uh, lineage. So i- in some ways, we created our own fossil record in the lab by evolving and generating these flasks. And every gen- every step of the way, we also froze these cells uh, and took stocks of them in the, in the cryo freezer.
1:13:58 Lex Fridman? How long does it take to go from one generation to the next of bacteria?
1:14:01 Speaker 01 If you, uh, for E. coli, it's usually twenty minutes.
1:14:06 Lex Fridman? Okay, great. So that's the experiment.
1:14:09 Speaker 01 That's the experiment.
1:14:10 Lex Fridman? And, and you're, you're always messing with it in the same way for the initial?
1:14:15 Speaker 01 It's the, it's the same way. So we, we introduced variation at the elongation level because, uh, so because we, um, per derved it with different elongations, we found that if we introduce a different protein that is very different, the cells don't like that, right? So if the distance is larger, the consequence is also large, meaning that you hit them harder if you introduce a variant that is really foreign to them, that's really distant. In, if, in our case, it was the ancestor. They really did not like the ancestor, but they were okay with their nearest cousin.
1:14:49 Lex Fridman? Right. Okay, great. So you did vary in the distance?
1:14:52 Speaker 01 We varied the dis- evolutionary distance and then we kept the experiment, experimental conditions the same. And we propagated these populations every day for a hundred and fifty days. And we collected, um, bacteria at every step of the way and looked at the sequence. We wanted to understand what sort of changes may have happened in the genome to respond to, uh, the variation that we've introduced.
1:15:18 Lex Fridman? So what kind of changes are you, would you be seeing depending on the evolutionary distance of the thing you shoved into it?
1:15:23 Speaker 01 Exactly. So we knew where we punched, right? We punched right the heart, right? We punched the translation. So we, we expected, is it gonna be, is it translation?
1:15:33 Speaker 01 Are we gonna see a change? Will translation respond to this by fixing itself right away?
1:15:37 Lex Fridman? Mm hmm.
1:15:38 Speaker 01 Or will it be um another outside of translation, something completely different, a different module? Because translation itself is a module. Uh, or would be within elongation, a really sub protein level thing? So we uh had a strategy to un- identify uh the mutational pathways by categorizing what we expected to find or where.
1:16:03 Lex Fridman? Okay, so why does it not do multitasking? Why is it not improving multiple things simultaneously?
1:16:12 Speaker 01 It turned out that what we observed in general is that, first of all, the harder we hit the cells, the more likely they were to respond by changes right at where we hit it.
1:16:24 Lex Fridman? When you say hit it, you mean like changing something about the elongation?
1:16:27 Speaker 01 I like to think of it as hitting, because we are, I like to think of it as breaking the cell, right? I mean, not breaking enough to kill it, but we still, because they're still alive, they're not doing their job well.
1:16:36 Lex Fridman? So the the the bigger the evolutionary distance of the thing you put in there, the the the harder the hit is how you think about it, the bigger the hammer?
1:16:46 Speaker 01 Bigger the hammer, exactly.
1:16:47 Lex Fridman? Do you hit it with? Okay.
1:16:48 Speaker 01 It, that's what it turned out to be, because that's what the data told us, that if we um if the variation is higher, then the uh consequences will also be higher, in the sense that the cells will not grow as healthy compared to a a variant that is coming from a near uh or a variant that is coming from a near evolutionary distance.
1:17:07 Lex Fridman? Is it, is it wrong to think of this kind of hitting as a, it came to a mutation? Or no? What are we supposed to learn from this hitting? Like, how? How the thing evolves after it's it's being hit in this way? What does that teach us?
1:17:21 Speaker 01 Because we we see translation machinery as almost um. It is so conserved and so essential. It is not even clear whether we can remove some of the parts or whether the entire translation will need all of the same parts in the same efficiency. We don't understand the rules of this machinery. So the first thing we understand is that how, what is the resilience? What are we really talking about here when we talk about you cannot mess with this translation? Is this true? Because it is so conserved and so similar and functions in the most conserved ways. Uh, that was the first thing that we want to understand.
1:17:55 Lex Fridman? Did you learn anything interesting about the resilience at the chemical, physical, informatic, computation?
1:18:00 Speaker 01 No, I, I wouldn't say that. I think in the biological level, yes, because we found that the different modules started responding to the changes that we've introduced. And that we could never recover the translation as effectively as it used to be. So that it never reached to, it is um uh, optimality, that it was always suboptimal. It, it needed 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 was accumulating mutations. It was getting better at its task. Maybe it needed a couple of other mutations to get really good at it, but somehow those mutations never happened. And before those mutations happened, we saw another module
1:18:45 Speaker 01 um, emerging through mutations and getting better at its own different task that is not translation. You can think of cell as a web of networks, right? Uh, and we think of this as multiple, almost airports that are proteins that are more central hubs versus there are proteins that maybe are not as important hub. If you introduce a problem in the most populated hub, you're gonna mess up the traffic system more drastically. And, and that's what we were messing with in, in the biological terms as well.
1:19:15 Lex Fridman? So when we say module, like translation would be one of the modules.
1:19:18 Speaker 01 Translation will be one.
1:19:19 Lex Fridman? So you're basically saying when you mess with translation, the organism would choose to either try to fix that module or another module depending.
1:19:31 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:19:31 Lex Fridman? But it wouldn't do multiple modules.
1:19:33 Speaker 01 It wouldn't do multiple modules. It focused on one module at a time. And right before that module maybe reached to its own maximum, it stalled its optimality at a certain degree. So you never get to a degree that is more optimal than you can achieve, even though perhaps another mutation could get you there.
1:19:51 Lex Fridman? Since you mess with the translation.
1:19:54 Lex Fridman? From a sort of optimal perspective, wouldn't it make sense for the cell to try to start fixing the translation?
1:19:59 Speaker 01 Not that's exactly what we thought and it didn't, it was not the case for all the broken translation missionaries. For instance, if the variant was coming from a near ancestor, that didn't happen. It was almost cruising around trying different modules and sort of living its best life still without, because there is no real urgency in the system to fix the most important problem.
1:20:20 Lex Fridman? And there's also not a direction. You know, maybe to you it's obvious that's the problem, but to the cell, maybe you're the problem. I'm living, like you said, my best life. Like we don't, I mean, I guess that's the thing about evolution is we don't know what the right direction to.
1:20:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's almost like you can imagine that you have this messy closet and you know.
1:20:43 Lex Fridman? Go on.
1:20:45 Lex Fridman? Happens to be an accurate representation of my life.
1:20:49 Speaker 01 So you can't, you, you take a look at it and you see all the sweaters or, you know, jeans are all over the place and then you look at a drawer that has socks coming out of it and you think that's the most important one. I'm just going to fix that one. And then you fix that one and then you think you will get to the other one, but you don't because you just fix the most important one. That is the whatever that was getting into your way. That's really what evolution is. It's quite lazy. It fixes the problem that seems to be the most immediate and it doesn't go beyond what it really needs to. It seems like at least for our experimental setup, that was the case.
1:21:21 Lex Fridman? Especially for rapidly evolving systems. So like, is the environment they're operating in pretty constrained? Like, is there urgency?
1:21:29 Speaker 01 I would, I would, I would say that we definitely constrain the environment. It's definitely removed from their natural setup. We are not evolving them in a gut. It's a very homogeneous system, very controlled, controlled temperature, controlled food, controlled carbon.
1:21:47 Lex Fridman? So just looking at that, let me ask the, the romantic question. How did evolution create so much beautiful, complex variety on Earth? Like from that, you're saying that we're talking about improving different modules. But if we step back and look at the entirety of the tree, of the different organisms that created all throughout history, the the stuff that's fun to you with the the first few billion and the the stuff that's fun to me when I watch on YouTube, which is like the the lion versus gorilla fights and so on. But the whole thing is fun. So with all that beautiful variety, from the predator and the prey, from the self replicating bacteria and all that kind of stuff, how did it do it?
1:22:28 Speaker 01 How is a very difficult question, especially when we don't understand the past with clarity at all. I can tell you that there seems to be very critical innovations that happened throughout the history of life, that are each themselves very sophisticated singularities that emerged once and then they set the tone, one of which is emergence of translation. It's seems like it happened once, it had to happen once, seems like that's all it took. 3.8 billion year, maybe older, clearly subjected to a lot of chemical evolution even prior
1:23:11 Speaker 01 to last universal common ancestor. And then you jump and you see emergence of cyanobacteria that's undeniably changed the course of those planets in the subsequent aerobic photosynthesis that life learned how to utilize what's available in the environment in the most profound way. And then you move forward, you see the emergence of eukaryotes, endosymbiosis, also another singular event. And then you move forward and then comes the plants. So these are, I counted, I think, six different things that seems to have happened just once.
1:23:57 Speaker 01 And
1:23:57 Lex Fridman? The singularity events in the history of evolution of life on Earth.
1:24:01 Speaker 01 So what's really fascinating here is that there seems to be two different courses, the time course. Evolution is operating at the molecular level, right? We're talking about seconds. We're talking about mutations that happen every second. We're talking about selection that's also happening under a minute, right? So that is a very fast process. The fact that I can evolve bacteria in a lab. And I say, almost complaining, oh, my goodness, it took me a hundred and fifty days. I mean, that's pretty rapid to for for a change to be seen. But then the big changes and the ones that I'm talking, the really big innovations that increased that caused an increase of oxygen on this planet, or even its own mere presence
1:24:46 Speaker 01 are due to these molecular innovations. Seems to only happen a handful of times over billions of years of time scale.
1:24:53 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you this question, having to do with my half asleep tweet. So saying that we all originated from one common ancestor.
1:25:04 Lex Fridman? That's just one of the miraculous things about life on Earth. Of course, you could say there's multiple common ancestors in the beginning, multiple organisms and so on. But the other stuff that you're talking about is this, these singular events, these leaps of invention throughout evolution and history. Now, there's a bunch of people who are commenting a bit surprising to me, who were basically skeptical of this idea.
1:25:31 Speaker 01 The idea of
1:25:32 Lex Fridman? Well, I would say evolution, honestly, the process of evolution. But when you just actually focus in on like, holy crap.
1:25:43 Lex Fridman? Eukaryotes were invented. Holy crap, photosynthesis were invented. Like, those are incredible inventions. And also, we can even go to Homo sapiens, like, intelligence. Like, where did that come from? It's there's these mysteries. I think where that skeptical comments are coming from were also just a general skepticism of science. I think from the pandemic, people, maybe a failure of institutions and so on.
1:26:13 Lex Fridman? There's been a growing distrust of science. And it's not so much that it's anti-evolution. It's more of a stepping back and saying, wait a minute. Maybe scientists don't have it all figured out. And I think to steel man that case is almost a step back and to realize there's so much mystery to each of these leaps. So it makes you wonder, is there something that in 100, 200 years we'll figure out that we totally don't understand yet? 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 panpsychists who believe consciousness is one of the fundamental laws of the universe.
1:26:58 Lex Fridman? There could be, you know, like we have laws of physics. There could be something that's like a consciousness field or something that permeates all matter. And so like there might be, it's kind of like Newtonian physics versus general relativity. Like we have a good understanding of how things happen, but we need another layer of understanding to fill in the gaps of the mysteries of it all. And that sort of is a sobering reality that maybe there is something we really deeply don't understand. Do you have a sense of where the biggest mysteries here are? Is it the origin of life itself? Is it the leaps that we're talking about?
1:27:42 Lex Fridman? So you, you see the beauty. You're fascinated about the translation mechanism. What are the deep mysteries there to you?
1:27:54 Speaker 01 We are nothing but chemical systems capable of formulating or answering questions about our own existence.
1:28:04 Lex Fridman? We humans or all of life, you think?
1:28:07 Speaker 01 Humans, humans are, I mean, the fact that we can, we even have this conversation about our place in the universe is, is, at least to our knowledge, is quite specific to our own chemical species. But.
1:28:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's kind of wild. We're, we're introspecting on our evolutionary history and we're just a couple of organisms.
1:28:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:28:32 Lex Fridman? With like another organism listening to this and like they're mind blown. There's like three organisms, two of them talking and the third one's like, holy shit.
1:28:44 Speaker 01 I, I think that understanding the, what I really find interesting about understanding origin of life or, or even contemplating about our own place in the universe. If at the end of this would come down to appreciating or even before appreciating, really truly comprehending what it is that we got here.
1:29:05 Speaker 01 That to me is a huge gain because there is no single question in biology, I think, that will give that that will deliver that magnitude of that message and understanding. But understanding how life here started at first place, if, if we truly comprehend that. We, this is not a concept that is well thought in schools. We ask students to memorize these concepts, may, if they are lucky, they learned RNA world.
1:29:35 Speaker 01 Chicken and egg problem, et cetera. That's the extent to which that got, maybe their biology teacher was personally interested in the subject matter. If they're lucky, you know the saying that the, the
1:29:48 Speaker 01 brain, brains are evenly distributed across any metric you can imagine, but opportunities are not.
1:29:58 Speaker 01 So if people aren't understanding the importance of this is because that's a lack of opportunity right there. That was skipped through the proper education and training, then the delivery of why science matters, or how science actually works.
1:30:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but how do you even begin to seriously think about the origin of life? I mean, every problem of existence of life has its time. So I don't know if it's time to understand consciousness yet. We might be 100 years away from that. The origin of life, I don't know if it's time for us to understand that yet. Maybe we need to solve so many more problems along the way.
1:30:46 Speaker 01 It's not a competition of problems, right? So there are all kinds of problems, and it takes a lot of people to make the world. So you will always have some interesting brain going after an interesting problem to their own. The issue here is that we need to, first of all, understand that what we have going on on this planet is pretty good. Good planets are hard to find. If we are alone in the universe, that's huge. We need to take care of what we got here. And we are incredibly vulnerable to the changes that our own species also helped create at the biosphere, at the ecosystem level. We take it for granted.
1:31:29 Speaker 01 We take what we created for granted because of the fact that we think we are some sort of ultimate endpoint, the most sophisticated, amazing thing that nature could generate. I think understanding, not even understanding, but asking these questions of where did this even come from? How did this even begin? And...
1:31:54 Speaker 01 Attempting to understand that using chemistry and physics and biology and because we can. That's the ultimate gift we can give back to the entire species on this planet.
1:32:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, it's humbling. It's humbling to realize the complexity of this whole mechanism. It certainly puts humans in their proper perspective. That we're not. Just because we have brains and brains are intelligent doesn't mean we're the most intelligent thing, because ultimately, the whole mechanism of nature seems to be orders of magnitude more intelligent. All of it, like we're a bunch, we're like a hierarchy of organisms that have a history of several billion years. And that all somehow came together to make a human. And there'll be life after us, just as was life before us. And something that comes after will be perhaps even more fascinating.
1:32:47 Speaker 01 I think when you understand the magnitude of what happened here, there is no room for arrogance. It should overwhelm you and humiliate. It's pretty humiliating.
1:32:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:32:57 Speaker 01 You know, it's quite amazing what was what happened here. And there is no other discipline that will deliver that but exploring our own origins and looking at life as a more planetary system phenomenon rather than one single species at a time, a collective look.
1:33:19 Lex Fridman? You mentioned this question in your TED Talk is the two possibilities of the universe being full of life and the universe being empty and we're the only life in the universe. How do you feel about both options? Just actually you as a single chemical organism introspecting about its existence in this world.
1:33:45 Speaker 01 It's having a planet full of life is interesting because there are, we talked about. Life being all about chemistry, exploring solutions. And having solutions in front of you is is is great. It's beneficial, right?
1:33:59 Lex Fridman? So solutions being different organisms, like other humans, you see them as a solution to a chemistry problem.
1:34:04 Speaker 01 Different, different, yeah.
1:34:05 Lex Fridman? Oh, that's an interesting solution. That's not next time. We're in Austin, so there's a bunch of weirdos. Every time I see a weirdo, I'd be like, oh, that's an interesting solution to this chemistry problem.
1:34:16 Speaker 01 Now you think like an origin of life site, but it's.
1:34:19 Lex Fridman? Funny that that one worked out. Let's see where else it goes.
1:34:23 Speaker 01 But having this emptiness and unpredictability of uncovering a novel solution can also have its own benefits. And and we should be open to what other solutions might be out there and exploring those solutions.
1:34:40 Lex Fridman? Or to different chemistry problems. So that's where you see you see the other planets out there as different chemistry problems.
1:34:45 Speaker 01 To their own local environment, yes.
1:34:47 Lex Fridman? So how many chemistry problems have solutions that are lifelike to you out there in the universe?
1:34:57 Speaker 01 It's a wide open palette, if you think about it. I don't quite know. It's the we know the the chemistry is chemistry. I don't think the chemistry will be different elsewhere. But again, what is selected by chemistry will be determined by the environment, most likely.
1:35:10 Lex Fridman? See, I think there is life everywhere out there. So there's a guy named Nick Lane. Who's gut, and it's interesting to me. I wonder what you think about it is his gut is there's life everywhere out there. But it stops at like the bacteria stage. So he says the eukaryotes is like the biggest invention and the hardest one.
1:35:37 Speaker 01 I wonder if he thinks that's an accidental outcome, if he thinks that's inevitable. I wonder what that means. But it's it's very it's a likely possibility that the bacterial or microbial life is definitely more attainable.
1:35:52 Lex Fridman? So that that's a weird world where our entire galaxy just has bacteria everywhere.
1:35:59 Speaker 01 So, you know, if you don't like microbes, you're on the wrong planet.
1:36:03 Lex Fridman? No, I know. Yeah. And viruses. I don't know which one there's more of. But they're they're both and most of them are like productive.
1:36:12 Speaker 01 They're fascinating. They they do everything for us.
1:36:14 Lex Fridman? If you don't like microbes, you're on the wrong planet. Uh, you're full of good lines. Okay. Right, right. I just can't. There's like an imperative to the whole thing. To me, the the origin is the hard question. But once it gets going, I just don't see.
1:36:33 Speaker 01 Wait, go ahead.
1:36:35 Lex Fridman? It seems like it's constantly creating more intelligent things. More fascinating, complex things they're able to solve.
1:36:44 Speaker 01 That's a very, that's a very interesting, like, that's, I I definitely agree that the initial steps may be the ultimate determinants. That once it's, you you cannot stop it once it starts. It's possible, right? And um.
1:36:58 Lex Fridman? I just have never unearthed, maybe, but maybe, I I just, whenever I see life, it seems to flourish. Everywhere. It, the thing is, I don't, the the only thing I haven't seen is the start of it.
1:37:16 Speaker 01 Exactly, but that, and how are we gonna understand that if we don't know the origin of life science? I mean, that that's the, and and the the question here isn't exactly our ability to recapitulate everything that happened in the exact way that it happened. Right? This is about what can happen rather than, or maybe how.
1:37:37 Lex Fridman? You think it is possible to study the origin of language using English? So, like, there's a very particular chemistry here. There's a particular set of assumptions, understanding about what life is, what everything is. Our perception of reality is very specifically constructed through the evolutionary process. I wonder if it's possible to get to some first principles, deep understanding of how life originates in such a way that you can actually construct it on other planets. I ultimately, it it feels like if you're doing it in a lab on Earth, you're always going to be using some aspect of the life that's already here.
1:38:21 Speaker 01 So, uh, that's what I sort of talked about in my talk as well. And um.
1:38:28 Lex Fridman? Everyone should go watch the TED Talks. Very good. The the annoying thing to me about TED Talks, I guess it's by design, is they're too short. It's like, come on.
1:38:40 Speaker 01 And did you know that there is no prompter involved?
1:38:43 Lex Fridman? There's no, there is?
1:38:45 Speaker 01 There isn't.
1:38:46 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you have to memorize stuff. Yeah.
1:38:50 Speaker 01 And thanks to my amazing editor, who probably is watching this too, David Biello, that it was very, very helpful. But I would say that-
1:38:59 Lex Fridman? Professional organization. I like this podcast. It's a very professional organization. I respect that medium. Yeah, anyway, in the, in the talk about, yeah, life, life creating life.
1:39:11 Speaker 01 So the likely scenario that once we understand how
1:39:18 Speaker 01 life is a chemical system is, is capable of formulating its own expression and generating a memory and manages its existence on a planetary body for billions of years. Once we understand what conditions gave rise to that, we may be very likely to understand
1:39:47 Speaker 01 whether a different planet also be likely to instigate its own chemical revolution if it were, it was provided by, through some missing ingredients. You can think of it as a sending fertilizer to a different planet that is missing its own chemical composition or lacking, or that it needs more of what it has. The difference between making that planet Earth-like, which was, this is, this is not what that's about. We're not talking about terraforming, or we're not talking about turning that planet into Earth-like system. We are talking about first understanding that planet, studying its chemistry, studying its, its properties well enough
1:40:30 Speaker 01 to understand whether it is close to its own chemical revolution and maybe giving it that extra notch. So this is obviously a pretty big speculation and suggestion. And it's a very interesting proposition because this is a yes or no question, right? This is, this is the ultimate would you rather? It's the, and I think it says a lot about the perception of the person who's answering this question. That if the answer is, no, no, no, absolutely not, that's not something we want to do, I want to know why that is the case.
1:41:05 Lex Fridman? So just to be clear, what we're talking about is looking at the chemical cocktail of a particular planet.
1:41:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:41:11 Lex Fridman? And having like tasting it and seeing, seeing what's missing. So having a very systematic, rigorous, scientific process of understanding what is missing. Not what is missing in terms of to make it Earth-like, but what is missing in order to be sufficiently, have the spark or the capacity of the spark to launch the evolution revolution, the evolutionary process.
1:41:39 Speaker 01 Exactly, so.
1:41:40 Lex Fridman? And then the question is, do we want to then complete the cocktail?
1:41:45 Speaker 01 The proposition is to also make us think that we will likely have this capacity at some point, especially when we understand origin of life better and better, right? So we will be asking ourselves this question. I guess I wanted to bring this to daylight a little bit because maybe in 10, 20 years, maybe more.
1:42:09 Lex Fridman? So you wanted to ask the ethical question. Should we basically start life elsewhere on another planet?
1:42:19 Speaker 01 Or enable the chemical, the chemical capacity of that planet that it may want itself get there.
1:42:28 Lex Fridman? Okay, so for me, the 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 your main concern a chemobiological one or is it an ethical one? What do you think about?
1:42:50 Speaker 01 Well, the worst thing that can happen is that it wouldn't work, right? So that it's not a likely, it's not likely that an attempt like this would work. That's probably, because how do you?
1:43:03 Lex Fridman? You think so?
1:43:03 Speaker 01 You've got to be very, you know, you have to have an understanding that I don't think we have just yet.
1:43:10 Lex Fridman? I see, because if it doesn't work, then we could try again, right? To me, the worst case, the thing I would be worried about is we create life. I mean, the same stuff I worry about, like with plants or is things that might have a conscious experience. And then the dark aspect of life is life is increasingly a complex life. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, but it seems to have the capacity to suffer.
1:43:44 Speaker 01 Huh.
1:43:45 Lex Fridman? And so we're creating something. It's like when you have children, you put creatures into this world that will suffer, can suffer and may suffer, depending on how you view life, may likely suffer. And so now you carry this responsibility for doing your best to alleviate any suffering that might go through. And that perhaps is a romanticizing this notion of life. Perhaps bacteria are not capable of suffering, but perhaps it'll create more complex life forms that would be able to suffer. And that feels like a responsibility as well.
1:44:29 Lex Fridman? 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 humans? Yeah, my concern is more, I feel like that's a solvable problem. The problem of creating conscious beings that are able to suffer, that's a tricky one.
1:44:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can see why, because it goes back to, again, would we, first of all, do we have a responsibility to propagate more of this chemistry that we have on this planet elsewhere? Given that we know ultimately we will be vanished.
1:45:14 Speaker 01 By we, I mean entire planets. And if this is in fact a very rare chemical event that happens because all the right circumstances came together and we were the lucky one. Do we have
1:45:32 Speaker 01 a responsibility to sponsor it? This is, if if we were to back up.
1:45:37 Lex Fridman? Sponsor, I like it. It's a good way to put it.
1:45:40 Speaker 01 If we try to back up remnants of our civilization, right? So we wanna potentially create conditions on the different planets so that humans can survive, given that we know or we want to, just just for the sake of growing.
1:45:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah, propagating, uh, becoming a multi-paternal species.
1:46:03 Speaker 01 Exactly, but what really is at stake here, I think is actually, or what is really more interesting is what we don't see, which is the, again, that the chemical behavior that enabled everything in the first place. That's different than sending potato crops or engineering bacteria to live on different planet. That's very different. You're really stripping it down to what is what is what is possible at the chemical level. So even if you are instigating the chemistry on different planets, you are letting that very planet to do its thing. You're not necessarily contaminating this planet with different chemistry because
1:46:45 Speaker 01 the idea behind this, at least the way I would, I I thought about is that you understand that planet, you understand the conditions, you understand the chemistry of the planet really well before choosing the planet as a candidate at first place. And then it's not about sending a missing ingredient per se, but again, just sending more of what it already has.
1:47:11 Speaker 01 That would be respecting that planet's condition to. So I'm not suggesting any occupation. I'm not suggesting any colonization. I'm not suggesting any, like, let's just strip everything and make everything Earth-like. That's not what I'm saying. It's more about empowering that place. What you are saying is likely to be the motivator behind all this. Let's not, because I see suffering, I see pain. It's very interesting. I think this is a question that really reveals about, a lot about the person who's answering it.
1:47:44 Lex Fridman? Well, okay, so the pushback on my pushback. If I so am deeply troubled by suffering, then I should be probably paralyzed about the history of life on Earth. And, you know, there's...
1:48:00 Speaker 01 Can you elaborate? What do you mean?
1:48:02 Lex Fridman? Most of life who's ever lived suffered in ways that are almost unimaginable to me.
1:48:09 Speaker 01 You mean, like, our own species?
1:48:12 Lex Fridman? Our own species and before, and animals living today. And we're not even talking about factory farms.
1:48:20 Lex Fridman? We're just animals living in extreme poverty in the jungle. You don't, people think like in the natural environment, animals live in a happy place. No, it's a brutal place of desperately trying to survive, of desperately trying to look for food.
1:48:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:36 Lex Fridman? And it's just like, all of that life, that's 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 maybe this idea of death, this idea of suffering, is actually, this thing that we see as a bug, is actually a feature.
1:49:01 Speaker 01 I don't think suffering is a linear property like that with life. And I may be with Nick Lane on this one, that the likeliness of anything similar to what we got here, evolving in another planetary body, I think is quite low.
1:49:16 Lex Fridman? Where would you say is the biggest unlikely thing? Do you mean humans, or do you mean even multicellular organisms?
1:49:23 Speaker 01 Probably multicellular, multicellular, it's, but I understand the, both sides of the equation, right? In one level, I can see that we may not have any other choice but to...
1:49:40 Speaker 01 Back up this chemistry somewhere else.
1:49:43 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:49:43 Speaker 01 So you would be saving, it's the ultimate saving or the record, our own record. It's not about, you know, yes, let's also save Beatles and all the amazing songs. But this would be the ultimate repository of life. But I can also see your point of view, for sure.
1:50:03 Lex Fridman? It's really interesting. So like, don't see the plan with a missing ingredient. Try to understand with the ingredients it has, is it possible to construct life?
1:50:15 Lex Fridman? For me, from a computer person, it just feels like something that could be solved computationally.
1:50:21 Speaker 01 We can learn from the mistakes that we've done here and aspire not to repeat them. It is possible. We do amazing things as humans. There's a lot of suffering, but there's also a lot of beauty. And we could choose what we want to be or what we want to see, right? So these attempts don't need not to come from, need not to come from a place of fear. But it can be ultimately, can come from a piece of hope and love.
1:50:53 Lex Fridman? I think we're just very recently figuring out stuff like we've even just a century ago, we're doing atrocities that weren't seen as atrocities at the time. I mean, I think we're learning very quickly of what is right and wrong.
1:51:07 Speaker 01 Yes, and I work with a lot of, maybe because I'm at the university, I get to teach young people every day.
1:51:16 Speaker 01 Even at the time of four year or three, few years, you see
1:51:23 Speaker 01 generational difference already unfolding in front of you. And maybe that's why I see hope. Because I think what we get to interact with in classrooms every year is just getting better. They are aware of issues in a way that I sure wasn't at their age. Some levels I was, but in many levels I didn't think about. I wasn't concerned of the problems. Well, they maybe have to be concerned because it's hitting the reality, it's hitting them hard, but.
1:51:57 Speaker 01 Younger people are not afraid of these things. An 18-year-old can face these brutal facts about the planet in ways that I don't think any other generation before them did.
1:52:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's super cool. And like the, you know, there's all these cool technologies that aid in the process of a human being, being able to see the truth at deeper, deeper levels. Like, you know, Wikipedia and just the internet in general is enabling education at a level that was unimaginable before the internet.
1:52:26 Speaker 01 Yes, and I think space exploration, even contemplating about these possibilities ultimately, and I will emphasize this again, should make us think about our own place in the universe. If we are alone, that is quite fascinating. And we definitely have a responsibility to guard what we got better and protect it better and don't take it for granted. If we are not the only one, that's also a lot of responsibility to understand what else is out there. So either proposition is famously being told is fascinating. But as a scientist, I think, and I think that's a general behavior, maybe not my fellow scientists listening to this can correct me if they aren't like this,
1:53:09 Speaker 01 but you need to have a level of optimism and hope. That's something, you know, that things are worth working for, worth dreaming, worth imagining. And we cannot just have fear of suffering or fear of pain stopping us from doing marvelous things.
1:53:30 Lex Fridman? I've talked to quite a few people in my life 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 for critics and cynicism in this world, but in terms of actually building things and creating things in this world that help a lot of people, I think optimism is a requirement, is a precondition in almost all cases in my limited, humble, human experience. But I tend to, when I look out there, think that aliens are everywhere. I think there's...
1:54:09 Lex Fridman? To me, I have a humility about, I tend to see us humans as being very limited cognitively. Like, there's so many things we don't understand. I think eventually we'll understand, of course, we don't know this, but my gut says we'll understand that alien signals and life has been all around us. And we're too dumb to see it. Like, whatever life is, whatever the life force is, whatever consciousness is, whatever intelligence, whatever the mechanism that led to the origin of life on Earth was everywhere. And we're just too dumb to see it. It's in the physics. It's somewhere, we'll find it somewhere in the physics.
1:54:54 Speaker 01 I think that's one of the most, is humbling parts of also being a scientist, that we know, that we never know for sure. And for the outsiders, perhaps, that may be a very strange way of living. Especially when your pursuit is about creating knowledge. And that you'll know that what you created can also be, and hopefully will be disproven, so that another level will rise. And I think we've seen that, this lack of maybe connection between the approach to
1:55:37 Speaker 01 science or knowledge versus folks who are maybe not thinking about these problems every day, that we are okay with being wrong. That's, in fact, we know that that's the only way to push the limits of knowledge.
1:55:51 Lex Fridman? How do you think life originated on Earth? We've talked about this a bit. Do you have a gut feeling about, first of all, actually even to step back, do you think, because you were flirting with this idea, did the translation mechanism came before life?
1:56:07 Speaker 01 I think that you cannot separate from emergence of translation machinery from emergence of life, or something like translation machinery, this whole informatic chemical computing system that is also capable of dynamism and evolvability that comes with biology, biological behavior from emergence of life itself. We definitely took a lot of steps towards understanding origins. We are able to create molecules from, right, environment, lightning, heat, and you make amino acids. So we are able to create the building blocks, the Miller-Urey experiment.
1:56:49 Speaker 01 That's now like sixty years ago. We are able to create the building blocks. We are able to make them interact with one another. They can get more complex. Some call this messy. There's all this chemistry that's going on. We are able to have these chemicals interact with one another, maybe have even some emergent properties that we can quantify. Definitely, there is this trend towards more systems-level approach to origins, with more introduction of systems-level chemistry, more network-level chemistry, and complex system integration in order to understand how, now that we can make these building blocks, we can make them interact with one another,
1:57:34 Speaker 01 but how do we make them interact with one another in more intelligent ways that will have the properties of a biological system? It will be heritable. It will be responding to the environment. It will mutate, and it will sustain itself. That is the final bit, I think, in our origin of life adventure. And we are extremely close. I'm very optimistic that our community will get a handle of this problem in this decade. This is, in fact, I think, one of the most exciting times to be doing this work.
1:58:05 Lex Fridman? What would be super convincing to you, like incredibly amazing, would blow your mind if it was done, X was done in a lab? Like what? Would you, I mean, I don't know if you would call it origin of life, but something really truly remarkable and special done in a lab. What would that look like to you?
1:58:27 Speaker 01 The, the, these properties that I listed, this was five properties that I listed about in machinery that is capable of sensing and responding to the environment. If we can, um, I would imagine it's similar to a milliureality experiment where they only sparked in particular environmental forces and were able to produce a chemical that is important for life or a mix of chemicals important for life or building blocks, rather. I would, if I saw that a similar experiment where a well-defined geochemical parameter was subjected on a mix of chemistry,
1:59:11 Speaker 01 which led that chemistry to form some level of computation, informatic, biological property. And by biological, I'm going to keep it to very minimum as I defined early on. That would be super exciting to me. A self-organizing chemistry that we can create experimentally in a flask by simulating the conditions of early Earth, be it radiation, be it temperature or mix of both. That would be very cool.
1:59:44 Lex Fridman? And doing all the five, the chemical, physical, informatic, computational, biological?
1:59:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:59:50 Lex Fridman? So like simulation and a computer would not?
1:59:54 Speaker 01 No.
1:59:54 Lex Fridman? Would not be good enough?
1:59:55 Speaker 01 It would be great because it's, they help to understand the parameters, maybe formulate, maybe quantify, create models. But ultimately, you need to experiment.
2:00:05 Lex Fridman? Unless it's quantum mechanical simulation, but that's going to be extremely difficult. So simulating from the physics up, that's going to be very, because you're going to have to simulate the, the physical, the chemical, the informatic. I mean, honestly, it's, it's, it's very start to, it's very difficult to start the quantum mechanics and end up in biology all through simulation.
2:00:28 Speaker 01 No.
2:00:28 Lex Fridman? But the stuff that DeepMind did with AlphaFold and the protein folding is really inspiring. It's a It's inspiring in that you're able to do to solve a difficult biology problem.
2:00:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's why there's definitely a lot of benefit to those models predictions because they at least helps the experimentalist to come up with the priors and parameterize things better. Maybe eliminate very obvious dead ends early on, given that experiments take such a long time and it's a huge investment. And no one's a better experimentalist than nature, so.
2:01:06 Lex Fridman? Let me, let me ask you perhaps a depressing, sad for you question.
2:01:10 Speaker 01 You really want to make me sad. You're not gonna win.
2:01:13 Lex Fridman? I know. There's a flame of optimism in you that will never be extinguished. Okay.
2:01:19 Lex Fridman? The idea of panspermia, you mentioned, would we seed another planet with life? Is it possible that our planet was seeded with life from elsewhere?
2:01:31 Speaker 01 So what the, the proposition I made, I like to think of it as proto-spermia rather than panspermia. Because it's even, it's even more, it's a more proto-state than acknowledging. Because in, in panspermia, you still have a cell, right? You still have something that is very, even a cell to me would be very earth-like.
2:01:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:01:52 Speaker 01 Right? I'm, I'm talking, I'm talking at subsolar level in, in the proposition of
2:02:00 Speaker 01 spreading chemistry.
2:02:01 Lex Fridman? So spreading chemical ingredients, not spreading life?
2:02:04 Speaker 01 Exactly. It would be more like the fertilizer that is well adapted and compatible with that planetary body. In panspermia, you're still imagining either an entire bacteria or a microbe or a cell or something that is DNA, which is still terran.
2:02:20 Lex Fridman? So in that sense, that would, that doesn't matter to you because it's, it's chemistry. That's the initial conditions. It doesn't matter how the initial conditions came to be. They are what they are and let's go from there.
2:02:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:02:31 Lex Fridman? And there, there's all kinds of fascinatingly different initial conditions in terms of chemistry and different planets.
2:02:38 Speaker 01 Yes, but, but in terms of panspermia, I mean, obviously that's, there's going to be always room for that those sort of discussions or there will be, those discussions will always be present, I think, in any life in universe debates. But the, the problem I have with panspermia is that it, it removes the problem from the planet to somewhere else. It makes it.
2:03:04 Speaker 01 Very difficult to answer scientifically, right? You you are just you just took the problem away from this planet and formulated in a way that I cannot go and try to understand in the lab, doing experiments, or even through models.
2:03:20 Lex Fridman? Does it though? So I've heard brilliant biologists like yourself say that, but I I just, to me, okay, here's how I think of Earth. So I 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 just an experiment by a graduate student, by an alien graduate student, like.
2:03:44 Speaker 01 So I know the exact episodes of Star Trek you're talking about.
2:03:47 Lex Fridman? But like, there is some, to me, that's inspiring. If we are.
2:03:52 Speaker 01 But that's not what Panspermia is about. That you're talking about my proposition. That's not what Panspermia is.
2:03:59 Lex Fridman? What's Panspermia?
2:04:00 Speaker 01 It is.
2:04:01 Lex Fridman? Oh, life just came from elsewhere. Still, that's interesting, because there's still giant leaps that happened on Earth, it seems like, beyond the initial primitive organisms, like eukaryotes.
2:04:13 Speaker 01 I don't think Panspermia usually articulates at the level of eukaryotes. I think they talk about bacteria primarily. I think so.
2:04:25 Lex Fridman? Right. So that that's still interesting, because all the different leaps of evolution still happen here on Earth. That's still interesting.
2:04:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's definitely interesting to listen to, but I I wouldn't place it in, I wouldn't know how to place it in the studies of origin of life, I guess, or early life.
2:04:44 Lex Fridman? Here's how we place it. You have the initial conditions for the origin of life, and you try to create life in that way that you've described in the five components, and it keeps failing. So what what Panspermia allows you to do is to also consider the question.
2:05:03 Lex Fridman? Maybe there's missing components.
2:05:05 Speaker 01 How do you answer that question?
2:05:07 Lex Fridman? Through exploration and through science. Looking outside, looking outside of Earth. Looking at the fundamentals of chemistry and physics.
2:05:15 Speaker 01 How do you understand that with fundamentals of chemistry and physics?
2:05:19 Lex Fridman? How do you understand, how do you understand gravity?
2:05:22 Speaker 01 But you're talking about panspermia, right? Just, I don't understand, how would you? It's different than, if you think it's similar to looking for life in the universe. Is that what you're thinking?
2:05:32 Lex Fridman? No, I'm saying there's a missing component that came from elsewhere.
2:05:36 Speaker 01 But a whole entire organism is not a missing component, right? That, right? I mean, when you're thinking about origin of life.
2:05:41 Lex Fridman? No, no, no, that's an assumption. Your assumption is all the ingredients for the origin of life are here on Earth. Now, I tend to believe that most likely that's the case. I'm just saying it's inspiring to think that there is some ingredients. You're gonna push back because that's not panspermia, that's proposed, but.
2:06:02 Speaker 01 See, okay, so think, but yeah.
2:06:05 Lex Fridman? It's also kind of fun to push back on you. No, I, I, I understand, I understand. I understand if actually a living organism ended up here from elsewhere. That means a lot of the exploration we're doing here with the ingredients that we know will not give us the clues to the, to the origin of life. But it just seems like it's still very useful to try to create life here. And then we'll see, wait a minute. Don't you think we'll be able to prove, not prove, but show that panspermia is very likely? Like, if we just keep failing, we understand biology deeply, understand chemistry deeply.
2:06:47 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't think so. I mean, there, there will be, the failure is, is not going to indicate that this must have been. I don't think anyone will put the problem to some, something else just because our failures, our experiments failed.
2:07:03 Lex Fridman? So failure means we don't understand the chemistry deeply enough?
2:07:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, and, and we, given the progress we made and how many brilliant people are working on this right now. And it's definitely more. I would say that we are approaching this problem in more broader ways, with different ways possible. I'm confident that we will get there. For us, again, we are interested in early cells and first cells and what followed, origin of life, but we cannot, given that it's a continuum, that's the between the origin and emergence of first cells. It's hard to separate these two ends from one another.
2:07:41 Lex Fridman? So given that life is a solution to a chemistry problem, if we reran Earth a million times, how different would the results be? If we look at that wheel, how different would be the the tree of life, do you think? Like, what's your gut say?
2:08:01 Speaker 01 My mind asks, are you imagining if if we're repeating the planet one million times, are we seeing? Are these things that happened, I'm not talking at the chemical level, but at the environment level? Do they happen at the same time, at the same frequency, at the same intensity? Every time you're running this tape over and over again?
2:08:26 Lex Fridman? Yes, you mean like geological stuff?
2:08:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, like so.
2:08:29 Lex Fridman? So you're saying those are important? I mean, that's that's
2:08:31 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:08:31 Lex Fridman? The fact that you would ask that question is also fascinating. So that's important? The the timing, the frequency, the intensity of geological events?
2:08:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, so 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 well, or whether we are also giving them more randomness? So if the volcano erupted, is it happening at the same time? If if you have a, are dinosaurs getting wiped off every time with the same meteorite that's hitting the same?
2:09:02 Lex Fridman? But also like temperature changes and all that?
2:09:03 Speaker 01 Changes everything.
2:09:05 Lex Fridman? That's actually, I've heard you say somewhere that one of the things that's fascinating to you about this whole process of evolution is that The process of evolution, all the mechanisms were invented and developed despite all the variation geologically, through the hardship that Earth has gone through.
2:09:27 Speaker 01 That the biological innovations persisted despite that?
2:09:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah, despite that, which is interesting. You kind of think of the biological innovations kind of happening in their own.
2:09:38 Speaker 01 Because we, so we actually have a center exploring this problem. We want to understand whether, it's almost like judging a book by its cover, right? Do you just look at an environment and then see whatever is present or scarce in that environment? And then think that, okay, the life form that will exist in this environment will obviously have a lot of molybdenum in its system. Look at all this molybdenum around here. Or will it be, because if you say that, you are now putting the environment in the more prime driver role, right? That you're saying that environment will determine what biology will or will not use.
2:10:19 Speaker 01 But we've done studies that show that it's not necessarily the straightforward. For instance, we looked at going back to nitrogen. One thing that's fascinating about the way cells fix nitrogen, the ones that can do, is that they also do this through a lot of help of a lot of metals, a lot of elemental support, really. And which geologists use to understand where did this metabolism even evolved? Where at first place? So we look at ancient oceans, we try to understand the elemental composition of ancient oceans. And what we see is that, in some cases, the metabolisms,
2:11:04 Speaker 01 even though they prefer a certain metal or an element that is in the environment.
2:11:10 Speaker 01 That metal wasn't abundant in the environment, but still, life chose that. So it's not that straightforward as though whatever you are, you are what you eat, but you don't necessarily eat what is obvious to you. Just because there's a lot of that food around you doesn't mean life will ultimately go there. Maybe most of the time it will, but it seems like in the case of nitrogen fixation, it didn't, and maybe that made the difference.
2:11:33 Lex Fridman? It's so cool that, right, it's not the abundant resource that's going to be the definition of what kind of life flourishes. So, so it's not, it's not a straightforward thing.
2:11:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:11:45 Lex Fridman? But your sense is that the different timing, the different conditions of the environment would change the way evolution happens.
2:11:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, for instance, I mean, there, I think it's in the eighties, maybe earlier than that, the Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life, which changed, I think, a lot of scientists' life, including mine. He contemplates on this notion of the tape of life, of course. I hope people still know what tape is, but I think your listeners will know what tape is. I don't know. It's the.
2:12:19 Lex Fridman? Tape? Go on, tell me about the tape. Is that, is that like a TikTok? Can you swipe on it? I'm sorry, go ahead. I apologize for my rude interruption.
2:12:30 Speaker 01 I kind of asked for it. But he speculated or suggested this hypothetical experiment, whether if life was recorded on, or can be imagined to be recorded on a linear, is it a linear chain of events recorded on a tape? And if we were to rewind this tape, would we listen to the same song? Right? So this was, and in his proposition, I also thought, 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 from equation a little bit, right? You're just. Removed it because you're assuming everything will happen at the same time, at the same intensity. So that's not too contingent.
2:13:16 Speaker 01 That means that the natural selection you're thinking is really operating it more or or evolution is operating it more under more random forces than that can be dictated by the environment. So in our way of understanding or thinking about rewinding, replaying, I don't think we're thinking about the role of the environment as clearly or don't seem to be integrated as much.
2:13:37 Lex Fridman? But I also wonder if it's possible that the chemistry ultimately defines the destination. That despite all the environmental changes, despite all the randomness.
2:13:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:13:50 Lex Fridman? We'll end up in something.
2:13:52 Speaker 01 But we are not talking about whether life will emerge and sustain itself. We're talking about whether life will emerge and sustain itself in the shape and form that is similar to what we have right now. So you are chemistry, I'm chemistry, we're having this conversation and your plants are chemistry too. They are also having their own conversation.
2:14:10 Lex Fridman? These plants are fake, but yes.
2:14:11 Speaker 01 I knew that. I didn't want to say that, but they they're fake.
2:14:14 Lex Fridman? But do you look at my place? Of course they would be fake, otherwise they would die.
2:14:18 Speaker 01 What's wrong with this place? It's a.
2:14:20 Lex Fridman? It's wonderful. It's it's I'm Allison, this is Wonderland. 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.
2:14:33 Speaker 01 Are you saying that you and I are the only living organisms? Well, obviously there are microbes in this room, but.
2:14:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Yeah, we are the only living organisms. I was thinking of getting a dog.
2:14:42 Speaker 01 Well, you you don't, this is not a clean room, so you you have microbes here.
2:14:45 Lex Fridman? Yes, many, millions.
2:14:46 Speaker 01 Yes. So so you and I and all the microbes in this room, your chemical systems that are operating in a way that we can respond and sense and our environments and whatnot.
2:14:55 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:14:55 Speaker 01 But in if you are asking if you're going to be here, then you're imagining that another solution is also possible, which is different than the fundamentals of life. Because life will do always, life will do its life thing.
2:15:08 Lex Fridman? Uh huh.
2:15:11 Lex Fridman? I guess it goes all the way back to the things we're talking about, translation, and the stuff you were messing with is figuring out what is the important stuff and what isn't. Makes me wonder about, you know, just like with the translation machinery with human beings, I wonder what's the important stuff. Is it important to have two limbs?
2:15:33 Lex Fridman? Is it important to have eyes? Like, it was obvious that the sensory mechanism of eyes, like sight, were to develop. How many times, if you were on Earth, would the sensory mechanism of sight develop? And what would it look like? Would it be one giant eye? Or would it be two? What's with the symmetry? Why are we so damn symmetrical?
2:15:53 Speaker 01 In response to Steve Jaygold's proposition,
2:15:58 Speaker 01 most people who would, who argue that life is convergent and it will in fact lead to a few determined outcomes. Or it's not that the outcome is determined per se, but it's, the pathways are restricted and the mutational trajectories that life can act upon are already very limited, so that the final outcomes are a few, and eyes being one of them. So the convergence at the eye level was suggested as an example, was presented as an example of why life may actually embark on the same solution over and over again, given that many species evolved independently from one another.
2:16:43 Lex Fridman? Do you think there's any inkling of truth to that? Like, is it just us humans thinking we're special?
2:16:49 Speaker 01 I think the, those innovations came again so far after the... I know it's, it's the fun stuff, yes, because it's, it's...
2:17:00 Lex Fridman? Thank you. I mean, thank you. I think we humans tend to talk about the later stuff, but without the earlier stuff.
2:17:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, so when we think of earlier, there's... And I ask this to my students too. I want them to close their eyes and think about just nothingness but dust. We don't have trees, we don't have plants. When we say an empty place, or visually at least, we are talking about a planet that is really alien. So, understanding our own past is similar to understanding an alien planet altogether. Given that it is a very different planet that did not have any oxygen for two billion years, there's nothing that is familiar to us that we would even think about when we think about life that is present in our past. Yet, here we are.
2:17:44 Lex Fridman? So cool. From that came this, like houses and people.
2:17:49 Speaker 01 And we are very, very, we are the super late arrivals to the party, right? So, this is definitely not our planets. It's the microbial planets that we live in.
2:17:59 Lex Fridman? But the potential to create us was always there.
2:18:02 Speaker 01 How do you know that?
2:18:04 Lex Fridman? Because we were created. Oh, I don't know. What is, you think it's possible that's, even for the early stuff, yeah, maybe if it's super unlikely, yeah, that we just got super, this is the planet that got really lucky, given the chemistry. Like, maybe to create the bacteria is not so lucky, but to create complex organisms all the way up to mammals, that's super lucky.
2:18:32 Speaker 01 Yes, and it may all come down to a few innovations that happened at the molecular levels that may or may not be inevitable. So, all these molecular tricks may have enabled the sort of mere existence of whatever you are able to define as familiar to yourself.
2:18:52 Lex Fridman? And you have a hope that science can answer these questions to reconstruct?
2:18:58 Speaker 01 Science is answering these questions. I mean, we are limited to going back to the beginning in our ways, right? So, we rely on biology. It's this overwritten, you're talking about four billion year old records that is ever changing, that again makes it beautiful, but also makes it difficult. It's not tractable. Geology has, to some degree, to some degree, it has a record of a more static.
2:19:28 Speaker 01 Frozen state record that is embedded on itself, on the surface of this planet, if we can find them. And that's the key, that most of these recorded remnants are,
2:19:45 Speaker 01 if we are lucky, we find them. They are not naturally selected. They're they're found, they need to be found for us to read them. So we work with a very handful set of samples, especially when we talk about the deep past, the planet with no oxygen. When we pass the great oxidation event threshold, that is about 2.5 billion years. So the earliest life is even harder. You are trying to write the story of life based on a handful of rocks and what is recorded on them.
2:20:17 Lex Fridman? Speaking of finding select remnants of our deep past, you said that you've been thinking about Nick Nealon's essay on scientific knowledge and scientific abstraction. So let me ask you, where do you think scientific questions and answers, or in general, ideas come from? You're a scientist. You ask very good questions and try systematically and rigorously to answer them through experiment. Where do you think ideas come from?
2:20:48 Speaker 01 So ideas come all the time, right? There are all kinds of ideas. There are good ideas, there are not so good ideas. There are really exciting ideas, maybe some boring ones. But if you are really interested in doing something different, then you need to be willing to take the risk to be wrong. And that's incredibly difficult, even though we talked about the idealist sort of notion behind science that we ultimately want to be rejected or our ideas need to be rejected for it to for the entire infrastructure to move forward.
2:21:27 Speaker 01 There is a level of risk-taking, I think, behind
2:21:33 Speaker 01 any creative idea. And I mean that in a true sense. If you are disappointed that your idea didn't work, then it wasn't a risk, because you still hoped that it will work. True risk is that you accept that it may not work, so that the failure shouldn't also surprise you.
2:21:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:21:55 Lex Fridman? Is it when you embark on stuff, do you, when you embark on an idea, do you actually contemplate and accept failure? Like, is it possible?
2:22:06 Speaker 01 Not consciously, I wouldn't say so, but I eliminated a lot of the things
2:22:13 Speaker 01 out of my work line by simply not feeling like studying them. I was bored chasing certain questions and I...
2:22:24 Lex Fridman? So you trusted the signal of boredom as a, as a good sign that it's not a good question?
2:22:29 Speaker 01 Yes, it should definitely be, whatever you're doing should be exciting. If you're the only, if there's only one person that should be ever excited about what you're doing, that should be you.
2:22:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:22:41 Speaker 01 And that's enough for, for that idea to go somewhere. I think that you need to believe in the idea. But at the same time, I think it's important to not fall in love with your mistakes. You know, that you, if, if something isn't working, you should let it go instead of trying to fix it. Even though you feel that this is a mistake or you know that it's a mistake, in order to, sorry, instead of trying to fix it,
2:23:12 Speaker 01 you should wrap it up and move on to something else, which is incredibly hard.
2:23:17 Lex Fridman? Good advice for science, but also good advice for relationships.
2:23:22 Lex Fridman? But, okay, so like, but that's actually really hard, especially, I mean, this is like PhD stuff. Like, if you sink in so much of your time, not even PhD, the entire, entire scientific careers, it's really tough to let go.
2:23:35 Speaker 01 Yes, and there is not a lot of room for true freedom. Um, maybe at at this certain degree. So first you need to be trained, right? It's not that scientists are just brilliant, amazing humans. I mean, they just know and learn how they they they know how to do science because they're trained in how to do science. So that that is important because I I the as someone who uh wants to definitely I'm hoping that I'm giving the message that this is for everybody, that there is this notion of science scientists being super smart people. That's definitely not true, right? It is a method that you learn to solve a problem. That's really what science is.
2:24:19 Speaker 01 And some are really good at it, uh, and they they get better at it under really good guidance, maybe good mentorship. Uh, and ultimately, everyone finds their own style of problem solving and what sort of problems they solve. But I have not met a scientist that finds their own pursue boring.
2:24:40 Lex Fridman? Well, it can happen, but they're not going to be effective, just like you said. I think it's kind of interesting because um in in the age of social media and and attention economies and stuff like that, you know, I've interacted with a lot of folks like YouTubers and so on. I think a lot of their work is driven by what others find exciting. And I think that ultimately leads to a life that's not fulfilling.
2:25:06 Speaker 01 I can see the reason behind it, or perhaps there's a again failure, a fear of failure that can be a major determinant of that pattern, right? So you try to do something that's accepted by others because that's maybe likely to give results right away. But it's a long game. It's a very long game. And if you are aiming a long-term change and long-term impact, you've got to be very, very patient about it. And you better um tame your ego.
2:25:42 Lex Fridman? I mean, on YouTube and those kinds of places on the internet, on social media, you get feedback like right away. And so it's even harder to be patient.
2:25:53 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:25:54 Lex Fridman? So in because, yeah, the change in ideas develop over a period of months and years, not decades. And the response from social media and so on is on the rate of seconds, minutes and hours.
2:26:07 Speaker 01 So I recommend actual physical libraries for people who may wanna appreciate or remember the sense of time and how long it takes to build something. I think it is, you're right, that's the immediacy and the right response of and the fact that these places are, the algorithm wants you to respond right away and interact with itself, right? So I can see the appeal. But true innovation, I think, doesn't even scream. It doesn't, it's not shiny, especially in the beginning. But it's also important to not fool ourselves and think that everything that people criticize has some super important meaning behind it.
2:26:53 Speaker 01 So it's a mix of the technique, the methods and your gut feeling.
2:26:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and a weird dance between learning and accepting the ideas of the current science and at times trusting your gut and rejecting those. Because science progresses by sometimes rejecting the ideas of the past or sometimes building on them in a way that changes them, transforms them.
2:27:21 Speaker 01 Yes, and I think what is hard is to really drill down into a concept, right? You can create a new thing and then it may be appealing and get a lot of, gain a lot of traction, but to sustain that, to continue that, you really need to show the true expertise. And so it's not only about defining a problem, but then really systematically solve that problem, maybe over the course of decades.
2:27:52 Lex Fridman? You mentioned library. I've also saw that you've translated scientific documents, or at least like mentioned that you did it at some point in your life. So let me ask you, how much do you think is lost in translation? In science and in life? How many languages do you speak?
2:28:12 Speaker 01 Two.
2:28:12 Lex Fridman? Two. How much is lost? In translation, in science and in life between those two?
2:28:19 Speaker 01 Well, it's actually three, because science is like another language, right?
2:28:23 Lex Fridman? It is. I speak Russian, a little bit of French. And it's always fascinating to see how much is lost. And the Soviet Union has a tradition of science and mathematics and so on. And it's interesting that a lot of the wisdom gained from that part of the world is lost, basically because of it was never translated.
2:28:44 Speaker 01 Well, I'm not sure if it is lost per se. I mean, I maybe it's more like a gain in some sense, right? Because you understand, and science is ultimately a human pursue. So you cannot separate. As much as maybe it's the best system that humans ever came up with to seek knowledge, to generate and make sense of the world. It works most of the time. It doesn't mean it's perfect.
2:29:16 Lex Fridman? Did the kind of translation do, by the way, was for scientific work?
2:29:20 Speaker 01 I directly translated for scientific work, yes. I think that, again, we, we, brains are equally distributed, but not opportunities are not, right? So if you want to include, if you want to benefit from all human power, whatever we can generate as human beings, you need to include everybody on the table. And that is by extending the opportunity. I think most of us that make it. Tend to think that we did because of something special about ourselves. And but it is important to know that, no, we were given opportunities. And that's why we are here, not because
2:30:03 Speaker 01 there was something inherently special about us, or
2:30:07 Speaker 01 or that the the system truly selects for the ones that really are.
2:30:11 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and language is a part of the opportunity.
2:30:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, language is an opportunity because comes with similar to bacteria, right? They they speak these languages, they they they have, even we call this, we call culturing the bacteria. We call it culturing, right? When we grow bacteria that we isolate from the environment in the lab, meaning that you create an environment for them to grow and thrive and sustain themselves. That's what we say, but cultures for microbiologists. For language, with language comes a different culture, a different perspective. And and you bring that to the table. I mean, it brings the sense of diversity that can only be achieved by clashing, perhaps, two different cultures, two different languages, two different approaches,
2:30:58 Speaker 01 maybe in some cases, four different approaches.
2:31:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I think language is not just a mechanism of communication. It's a way to, it's a dynamic system of exploring ideas. And it's interesting to see that different languages explores ideas differently.
2:31:14 Speaker 01 Yes, and I think that, so when I said science is like a language itself, I said it in two different ways. One is very, very literal meaning that you can speak English, but you that doesn't mean you will understand the scientific paper. That it's a different level of English that you need to learn to understand. Even not just for scientific papers, even from discipline to discipline. I I challenge any chemist to read an evolutionary biology paper.
2:31:42 Speaker 01 And vice versa. It may sound extremely different, a different language altogether.
2:31:47 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:31:47 Speaker 01 But there's also the, the language of communicating and because words matter, how we talk matter, how we represent our science matters. So yes, just learning English as a second language alone is not gonna make you fluent in science either.
2:32:01 Lex Fridman? And it's interesting because in that sense, you speak many more than three languages because you're pretty cross-disciplinary. It seems like you're, you're, you have a foot in, in a lot of disciplines.
2:32:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:32:14 Lex Fridman? I mean, you're mentioning geology, biology, evolutionary biology, I mean, there's chemistry.
2:32:22 Speaker 01 Biochemistry, biophysics, even we do a lot of statistics. So there's a lot of mathematics to what I do as well. Yes. We like to think of it as, as, uh, now astrobiology program says, I repeat it because it's fun that it is not a,
2:32:39 Speaker 01 fruit salad, but it's a smoothie, that that's what we are generating.
2:32:45 Lex Fridman? Uh, it's not a fruit salad. So a smoothie is a successful,
2:32:51 Lex Fridman? is a successful combination of those fields and a fruit salad is not.
2:32:54 Speaker 01 I wouldn't say it's success necessarily. It's some, if you put it, if you put the wrong ingredient and you press the blender, you know, you made it a smoothie, you mean, it can ruin the entire mix.
2:33:05 Lex Fridman? Can it though? Because I feel like.
2:33:07 Speaker 01 Yes, I can definitely assess that for ginger for instance, that ruins every smoothie. I don't like.
2:33:11 Lex Fridman? Ginger?
2:33:12 Speaker 01 I think so. But it's just a personal thing. And also I don't like cinnamon. But, um.
2:33:17 Lex Fridman? Oh, the ginger has a cinnamony taste? Because I thought ginger was.
2:33:19 Speaker 01 No, I don't think they do, but I, I also don't like.
2:33:21 Lex Fridman? Wasn't that a thing they add in a lot of smoothies? I was forced a smoothie. I, I went to Malibu with a good friend of mine, Dan Reynolds, and he forced me to consume a smoothie. And, you know, it's probably the first smoothie I've ever had. Because I always had, was very judgmental of the kind of places and people that drink smoothies, but it was, it was good. It was good.
2:33:40 Speaker 01 Well, smoothie is very American, so I.
2:33:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it is an American thing.
2:33:43 Speaker 01 I wouldn't say it's success per se, but it is true that when you dance at the edge of different disciplines, that, that's when the. Inevitably, the innovation will rise because you will see things um maybe a little differently when you're on the edge, right? So uh but it will probably take longer and it may not be understood right away. It may not come into final form quickly, given that it is a new
2:34:14 Speaker 01 concept rising. So therefore, the patience will make more sense. I'm sorry, patience will be even more important. So if you are um in other words, if you are into immediate appreciation, that's probably not the way to go.
2:34:33 Lex Fridman? You're one chemical organism. Uh so let me ask maybe a little bit more of a personal thing. Where did your life form originate? Um and what fond memory do you have from the early days of childhood?
2:34:49 Lex Fridman? That are representative of your bacteria culture?
2:34:54 Speaker 01 I was born in Istanbul. So I grew up in Turkey, um a city that has two continents, which is quite interesting. You have a you see a welcome to Europe sign and then welcome to Asia sign the same day, depending on which part of the bridge you are. Um so that's where I was born and I spent about roughly twenty years of my life and then I immigrated to United States.
2:35:24 Lex Fridman? It's a very proud culture. It's a beautiful culture. It's a very flavorful culture. Uh what aspects of it is part of who you are? What are the beautiful aspects that you carry with you in your heart?
2:35:39 Speaker 01 I think uh we are very sincerely human as a culture. I think we have the saying that don't go to bed. Fool if your neighbor is hungry. So, you know, you wouldn't eat any food in front of someone where I come from without offering to share the bite. So I think those things, however small they may sound, um, a really big deal, especially when you are put in a or move to a place that may not have those attributes. So I think that culturally there be a lot of conscious like
2:36:22 Speaker 01 you just raw, deep, human.
2:36:25 Lex Fridman? The connection, you value the connection between human beings.
2:36:28 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah. I think I definitely carried that with me.
2:36:31 Lex Fridman? We talk a lot about biology. Let me ask you about the romantic question. What role does love play in the human condition? Or in the entirety of life on earth?
2:36:44 Speaker 01 It's not easy to learn how to or how to love if you're not loved. Okay, so so it's something, but the good news is that it is something that um, you can learn, I think, that you can practice uh, and and teach yourself how to maybe give yourself the thing that wasn't given to you and then ultimately give it to others. I think it would be quite arrogant to think that we will be capable of loving, it could be anything really.
2:37:19 Lex Fridman? So just like translation, it's a repeating and a dynamical process?
2:37:23 Speaker 01 That you can learn.
2:37:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that you can learn.
2:37:25 Speaker 01 Yes, and you should learn. We should even, there is no excuse to not learning.
2:37:31 Lex Fridman? To love?
2:37:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:37:32 Lex Fridman? Because that's a deeply human thing.
2:37:33 Speaker 01 It is a deeply human thing. It's it is a very sad thing if if any one of us passes this planet without uh, knowing what love is. And that could be a love to a pet, a love to a plant.
2:37:45 Lex Fridman? To a robot?
2:37:46 Speaker 01 To a.
2:37:47 Lex Fridman? 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?
2:38:01 Lex Fridman? How to have a career they can be proud of, or how to have a life they can be proud of. You said an interesting thing about brains being distributed evenly, but opportunity is not. It's really interesting to think about. I've talked to folks from Africa. You realize that there's whole areas of this earth that have so much brilliance, but unfortunately so little opportunity. And one of the exciting things about the 21st century is more and more opportunities are created. And so the brilliance is unlocked in all those different places. And so all these young people now have the opportunity to do something to change the world.
2:38:43 Speaker 01 I had a chance to visit Bosnia. So I was invited to give a talk in a very northernmost part of the country that was impacted by the war tremendously. And it was a public talk. It was open to everybody in the village. And I was told even people drew from Sarajevo to attend. Whenever I think about our role as a scientist or the beneficiaries of the knowledge that we create, I always think about that night,
2:39:27 Speaker 01 that how many people were in that room. It was incredibly crowded. And lots of young people who were trying to start everything new and not do or not carry, replace whatever maybe the feeling that was taken from them with hope and love. Start a new beginning, be the seed for the next generation. And it moved me so much that they all came to hear about early life space, something maybe different for them that maybe they were always interested in and never thought about.
2:40:10 Speaker 01 But what what stayed with me was the just the look and the feeling, the look on their faces and the feeling in the room, the energy just was very moving to me.
2:40:19 Lex Fridman? Their willingness to be the seed, the the first of their family and generation to do that big new thing.
2:40:26 Speaker 01 Yes, and I will.
2:40:28 Lex Fridman? Take the leap.
2:40:28 Speaker 01 And that's exactly why I'm telling this whole story because um some for most of us, we may have to be that seeds in our families, that the first want to do something new,
2:40:42 Speaker 01 to do to break that cycle, whatever is it that you want to break free from. Uh I want I would want the young people to know that you can be that, that's that there are um
2:40:56 Speaker 01 just wonderful things to learn from this life and it's just incredible to be 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.
2:41:15 Speaker 01 And ultimately, I think um what it comes down to is to trusting yourself, trusting and respecting your voice. If you're not loved, learn how to love. If you were not respected, start by respecting yourself. Learn how to respect yourself, you can teach yourself things.
2:41:32 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's uh really difficult when you're surrounded by people that don't believe in you.
2:41:38 Speaker 01 Yes, I definitely know the feeling and I would uh just want them to know that they don't need to be defined by or reduced down to what others see in them.
2:41:54 Lex Fridman? Believe in yourself, have the respect, try to develop the respect and the love for yourself. And then from that, it flourishes, you'll find others that'll give you love.
2:42:04 Speaker 01 It may not, I mean, life is not fair, it's true.
2:42:07 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:42:08 Speaker 01 It's be be prepared that it's it's a it's a it's not very fair, unfortunately. And so I don't want to depict this Disney story that and then, yes, and everything will be just fine. It's mostly isn't, but you learn a way, learn, you know, life does it all the time.
2:42:28 Lex Fridman? Speaking of which, what do you think is the meaning of all this? What's the meaning of life?
2:42:34 Speaker 01 I
2:42:35 Lex Fridman? Why are we here?
2:42:36 Speaker 01 Why we are here?
2:42:38 Lex Fridman? All the beauty you've discussed. Why? Is the translational mechanism machinery here?
2:42:47 Lex Fridman? Why?
2:42:48 Speaker 01 I don't think
2:42:48 Lex Fridman? Why so much beauty?
2:42:50 Speaker 01 Why so much beauty?
2:42:53 Speaker 01 It is because we choose to see it that way. It's beautiful. But there is no meaning, I don't think, no. Yeah.
2:43:00 Lex Fridman? But why is it so beautiful? Why did we choose? Why? From where is the imperative to see it? To see so much beauty in a thing that scientifically speaking, or from a rational perspective, is void of beauty? It's just, it just is.
2:43:22 Speaker 01 Not everybody chooses to see the beauty.
2:43:28 Lex Fridman? Hate is gonna hate.
2:43:31 Lex Fridman? I mean, we have the capacity to see the
2:43:33 Speaker 01 We have the capacity, so why, why not use it to the fullest? Right? We, we have the capacity.
2:43:38 Lex Fridman? But that, that capacity, isn't that fascinating? That we developed that? It feels like that was always laid in there in, in the whole process of life. This ability to,
2:43:50 Lex Fridman? to find, to, to introspect ourselves.
2:43:53 Speaker 01 I mean, it's definitely soothing to think like that. But I don't think there is a meaning like that way. I, that, that's, it's fascinating that we can understand it.
2:44:04 Lex Fridman? But why is it soothing?
2:44:07 Lex Fridman? There's a desire, there's a longing.
2:44:09 Speaker 01 But soothing doesn't mean that there's a meaning. Why, why soothing in meaning? Let me just put it this way. Because there is just, I think, so much unfairness going on. I wouldn't even dare myself to think that there's a meaning to, out of my, out of respect to the ones that are suffering.
2:44:29 Lex Fridman? I see. I think.
2:44:33 Lex Fridman? I think out of suffering emerges flourishing and beauty. I mean, that's what I see.
2:44:38 Speaker 01 I agree with you.
2:44:39 Lex Fridman? When I went to Ukraine, I saw all the people suffering. In their eyes and in their stories is a hope for the future, is a love. Is a love for the people who are still living, is a love for life. So it's there. And that's the dark thing is the suffering and the loss somehow intensifies your appreciation of the life that is the left. That's a weird thing, too.
2:45:04 Speaker 01 I think that there is some, something about still doing your best and believing that there's whatever goodness is worth working for is beyond and to do that without a meaning. There is something more humiliating, humbling and profound about that. And we have a this will come out very random. Okay, so just in Turkish bathrooms.
2:45:48 Speaker 01 There is this sign that says, leave it as you want to find it.
2:45:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:45:59 Speaker 01 And I think that's a pretty good.
2:46:02 Lex Fridman? That's your, that's your meaning of life found in the Turkey. There's wisdom to that.
2:46:06 Speaker 01 There's wisdom to that, but it also is because however you leave defines you, right? So I think there's some profound meaning to that, too, that just, just leave it as you want to find it.
2:46:22 Lex Fridman? So that your little scribble in the long story of life on earth is one that ultimately did a pretty good job. You know, at least kept it the same as you found it.
2:46:36 Speaker 01 Or at least I left it in the way that I wish I found it.
2:46:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, right.
2:46:43 Lex Fridman? Oh, man.
2:46:44 Speaker 01 Yes, that's the wisdom from Turkish bathroom.
2:46:46 Lex Fridman? That's where I search for wisdom as well. And as we started with the origin of life and ended with the wisdom in a Turkish bathroom, I think that's a perfect conversation. You're an incredible person. The humor, the humanity, but also the brilliance of your work. I really appreciate that you would talk with me today. This was really fun.
2:47:09 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
2:47:11 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Batil Kuchar. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost. In three words, I can sum up everything I've ever learned about life. It goes on. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
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