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👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I mean, there are very few people in the world that can do this really well.
It's very easy to mess this up.
So I respect to them, but we can identify if it is just like amino acid on an asteroid versus a microbe that wants, or a once living microbe.
So we can do these sophisticated studies and we are getting there now with the sample return, right, with the Bennu.
Like it's just so much happening.
And in fact, it was today a paper came out, I was reading it on the way here, that took Deinococcus, this really resistant, crazy bug that can, you know, survive under really harsh conditions and radiated and it put this insane amount of pressure on it to understand whether this bug can survive planetary travel.
And they found that it can, at least numerically, it can handle really, really high pressure.
So that's kind of amazing.
I mean, they're kind of linking into that as well, very carefully, because that one line of data doesn't make an entire concept, you know, doesn't prove the whole thing.
But it is fun to think about it.
Well, protein engineers showed us about seven years ago, a paper came out that showed that in an enzyme, they could replace the carbon with silicon.
So at least engineering-wise, we demonstrated that you can, to some degree, push an enzyme to use silicon instead of carbon.
Yes, albeit with some variations in the sense of it's not maybe as efficient, but it's fine.
But in whole organism, look, nobody wants weird, strange life forms more than me.
But I also want to be able to study something and not hallucinate, right?
There's a part that imagination is great, but then you got to be, I think, a little careful and not go a little... Go too far.
Alien hallucinations can be a little too much.