Yesterday I had a fascinating conversation with the brilliant synthetic biologist George Church. This sporadic interdisciplinary dialogue was recorded for a novel podcast series coordinated by Rick Coyle, founder of Accelerator Media, a US non-profit organization dedicated to sparking curiosity and pursuing lifelong learning through educational media. The format of this novel podcast brings together two experts from different fields for an unstructured conversation on topics that connect or intrigue both participants. Our podcast is scheduled to air on January 16, 2025.
George and I discussed life in space from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to the distant future. The chemistry of life as we know it may have begun shortly after the first stars formed, about 100 million years after the Big Bang, in regions enriched in bulky elements by the first exploding stars. If what we find on Earth is representative, it would take billions of years for sophisticated multicellular life to emerge from the soup of chemicals, which would explain why we exist so behind schedule in cosmic history.
Life on Earth may have originated on Mars, which cooled earlier than Earth due to its smaller size. The blitz Mars could have carried rocks that reached Earth, carrying diminutive astronauts in the form of Martian microbes, 4.2 billion years before Elon Musk I wished send human astronauts to Mars.
If mirror life it was delivered to Earth from outside, was suppressed by terrestrial life, and had no major impact. Aliens may be among us, but we do not notice them. It reminded me of unfounded fears about… Large Hadron Collider at CERN producing mini black holes that could swallow the Earth. Cosmic rays routinely affect hadrons in the Earth's atmosphere at higher center of mass energies and have not caused a single catastrophe in the 4.6 billion years of Earth's existence.
I asked George if there were any local indications that life might have been seeded on Earth by an extraterrestrial gardener? He agreed that this is a viable hypothesis worth exploring because there are some unexplained gaps in our understanding of how sophisticated life emerged on Earth.
Ambitious space scientists and engineers could aim to seed self-replicating probes on fertile planets like Earth. If “gardeners” were technology platforms powered by artificial intelligence (AI), surely their creators would see the enormous benefits of chemistry in harnessing land-based resources and transforming the local soup of chemicals into self-replicating machines in the form of sophisticated life as we know it. A vision inspired by John von Neumann's vision then self-replicating machines of extraterrestrial origin is terrestrial life as we know it!
von Neumann proposed his abstract idea in lectures delivered at the University of Illinois in 1948 and 1949, before the discovery double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Three decades after von Neumann's lectures, Freeman Dyson proposed the concept Astrochicken in his book “Disturbing the Universe”. Dyson envisioned a spacecraft weighing one kilogram and combining biology, microelectronics and artificial intelligence to create self-replicating probes in space.
I told George that I was very impressed by biological life. After all, the human brain uses 20 watts and can perform many tasks better than the best artificial intelligence systems developed to date, which consume gigawatts of power. Multimodal analysis is an unsolved, state-of-the-art machine learning analysis model, while the human brain routinely combines data from our eyes, ears, and touch.
I asked George about his expectations for the future of humanity. Only a century has passed since the discovery of quantum mechanics, so we may only have another century left before our civilization destroys itself technologically. George added that the pace of technological progress is accelerating and existential risk is growing rapidly. The end of human history on Earth will likely occur long before the Sun boils away all of Earth's oceans in a billion years.
I saw that the key to survival would be our ability to escape to a habitable space platform from the rock we were born on. Humanity can survive if it stops investing $2.4 trillion annually for the military budget to invest the same amount in space exploration.
I don't expect peace-loving hippies to rule the world. Instead, I realistically hope that the discovery of aliens as smarter students in our knowledgeable technological civilization classroom will inspire us to do better. Our Messiah may come from another star.
As for our future, George noted that in the coming decades, the human brain will likely improve and become much more powerful. He also believes that our generation will be the first to have the ability to not die as synthetic biology will be able to repair the continued damage to our bodies over the coming decades.
Given his prognosis, George and I agreed to continue our conversation for millennia to come. I wonder what we might be talking about in a million years, when science and technology will be far beyond what we imagine today. I don't mind adding space scientists to the conversation. However, I will be insisting on a remote recording setup for this podcast because I'm worried about aliens infecting George and me with mirror pathogens.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
