George Church

It might lead us to believe that at least life exists.

Now, there are other parts of the Drake equation that might kick in, which is maybe it's hard to get intelligent life because intelligence isn't necessarily in your best interest.

And if you get intelligent life, it's hard to maintain that without societal collapse or without robotics taking over and then killing themselves, right?

And that's hard to do experiments.

But I think...

To your question, I think an experiment that showed maybe multiple different ways of getting to a living system from nonliving systems spontaneously would be interesting.

Again, I'm not sure it would be very hard to prove the negative.

Yeah, I think these are very challenging problems.

I'm not even sure we would be able to say within five orders of magnitude, much less 50%.

But, you know, I

I think it's more likely to come from exploration than it is going to be from simulation.

If, you know,

The sad truth is that almost none of the missions that we've sent outside of Earth have actually looked for life.

They've had components that could have looked for life, but a sad number of those, not enough components that could look for life, and the ones that could look for life, not really looking for it.

And when we get positive results, we dismiss them, as happened with the...

And so I think if we just start looking at the geysers that are coming out of various moons of Jupiter and Saturn, there's so much water.

There's 50 times more water, liquid water, not frozen, more liquid water in our solar system than on Earth.

Doesn't that seem likely that some of that would have been a good breeding ground for

But it could be that we need sunny shores, you know, where you have a lot of dry land right next to water.

Maybe these are just giant oceans that are surrounded by ice.