What Is the Origin of Life? Lex Fridman and Sarah Walker

Another exciting interview from Lex Fridman to watch over the weekend for those who didn’t get enough of the 8-hour podcast with Elon Musk and the Neuralink team.

Lex Fridman has recently talked to renowned astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sarah Walker about the mystery of the origin of life, aliens, and AI models in his video podcast.

Sarah Walker is a world-class scientist and professor at the University of Arizona, where she is a Deputy Director of The Beyond Centre. This unique science lab collaborates with NASA to study the origin of life and search for alien worlds.

“?? On August 6, Sarah Walker’s book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, came out.”

Interview Highlights:

?? Scientists still have no consensus on what life is. My definition is that life is the only thing the universe generates that has at least the potential for immortality.

?? Hopefully, our universe is teeming with life. But there are challenges, such as not knowing the likelihood of life. Therefore, the problems of discovering alien life and solving the origin of life are deeply coupled and, in fact, the same problem. The first contact with alien life will actually be in an origin of life experiment. We have to solve the origin of life to recognize other alien intelligence.

?? The origin of life is a continuous process. It’s interesting the way that sight has complexified over time. At the origin of life, nothing on the planet could see. So, for a long time, life had no sight, and then photon receptors were invented. When multicellular evolved, those cells eventually grew into eyes, and we had the multicellular eye. And then we invent even better technologies for seeing, like telescopes and microscopes, which allow us to see deeper into the universe or at smaller scales. The sight has transformed the ability of life to literally see reality.

?? Modern large language models show signs of intelligence and consciousness. Some people are convinced that they are already conscious. But we don't yet have a theory that explains when things are conscious or not and can be tested. Until we get one, this will remain a grey area.?

?? We used to store knowledge in books. Now, we can store it in a physical artifact, which is a large language model. I think about it almost like the evolution of genomes. Large language models are kind of like the genetic system for language, allowing us to archive data that has accumulated throughout human history. We can now communicate with a computer's crystallization of human language. We have effectively put the collective mind in a box.

?? The biosphere that originated on our planet and evolved over billions of years has evolved into the technosphere. This is the next phase in the evolution of life. When our civilization becomes multi-planetary, it will be akin to cell division. The technosphere solves its origin, figures out how that process works, understands how to make more life, and can copy itself onto another planet so the whole structure can reproduce itself.

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