David Kipping

So one with 195 zeros after it.

It's just incredibly unlikely that would happen by chance.

And we've never observed it in the lab.

No one's ever got amino acids to spontaneously form anything like a life form or proteins in a laboratory setting.

So it is plausible.

There's some unknown mechanism that accelerates that process, and we just haven't found it yet.

But it's also plausible it was just incredibly unlikely.

And maybe if you look out across 10 to the 22 stars in our universe, observable universe, there's just one success –

Now, the universe is probably infinite, so probably if you travel far enough, you'll eventually come to someone else.

Maybe.

But by all intents and purposes, we may as well be alone in that case, because they're outside our observable universe, so who cares what they're up to?

So I'm open to that possibility.

I'm not saying it's likely, but I think as a good scientist, I can't tell you, yeah, of course there is, because that's now falling into experimenter's bias.

I'm deciding what the answer is before I've done the experiment.

That's not my job.

My job is to figure out the answer.

Of course.

Like, boy, we better not fuck this up.

We're the only ones.

Yeah.