Andrej Karpathy

So it seems like definitely there are sparse events where a massive amount of progress was made.

But yeah, it's kind of hard to pick one.

Yeah.

I've been preoccupied with this question quite a bit recently, basically the Fermi paradox and just thinking through.

And the reason, actually, that I am very interested in the origin of life is fundamentally trying to understand how common it is that there are technological societies out there in space.

And the more I study it, the more I think that...

There should be quite a lot.

Yeah, and especially when you get into the details of it.

I used to think Origin of Life was very...

It was this magical rare event, but then you read books like, for example, Nick Lane, The Vital Question, Life Ascending, et cetera.

And he really gets in and he really makes you believe that this is not that rare.

You have an active earth and you have your alkaline vents and you have lots of alkaline waters mixing with the ocean and you have your proton gradients and you have the little porous pockets of these alkaline vents that concentrate chemistry.

And basically, as he steps through all of these little pieces, you start to understand that, actually, this is not that crazy.

You could see this happen on other systems.

And he really takes you from just a geology to primitive life.

And he makes it feel like it's actually pretty plausible.

And also, like, the origin of life...

was actually fairly fast after formation of Earth.

If I remember correctly, just a few hundred million years or something like that, after basically when it was possible, life actually arose.

And so that makes me feel like that is not the constraint, that is not the limiting variable, and that life should actually be fairly common.